Project is important to providing plant city with top-tier public safety.
On December 8, the city commission voted 5-0 to pass a resolution for New Vista Builders Group to complete pre-construction services for a new Public Safety Training Facility. The plan for the facility is for it to be built on the Plant City Police Department’s property located at 1 Police Center Drive.
The project plan calls for the construction of four buildings: a 40-foot by 60-foot classroom, a 72-foot by 26-foot, four-story training tower, a 45-foot by 124-foot truck storage building, and a burn building that will be 24 feet high, eight feet wide, and 40 feet long. These structures will provide a resource for practical skills assessment and specialized training.
According to Robin Baker, the city’s Engineering Department manager for this build, the burn building will be constructed using a pair of modified shipping containers. Each will contain burn chambers, stairwells, and doors and windows to use for fire suppression and search and rescue operations. The burn chamber itself will be two eight-foot by 10-foot high burn spaces with emergency exits. The burn chamber walls and ceiling will be insulated with 11-gauge steel, which is capable of withstanding repeated exposure to a high of 2,200 degrees. Each of the burn chambers has 5/16-inch chains on the walls and ceilings, baffles, and high-heat thermal-insulated walls with doors. This building will require inspection every three years to be in compliance with the National Fire Protection Association rules and regulations. The service life of the burn building is forecast to be at least 15 years.
Among the services New Vista will render are development of architectural contract documents, contract administration, surveying, schematic drawings, permitting, project management, and civil engineering. The cost for this pre-construction phase is $249,000, and is to be completed in three months. It is too early to pin down an exact number, but the working budget for the Public Safety Training Facility is $2 million.
This training facility will allow for practical skills assessment and performing specialized training to meet certain training requirements in the future. “We need the training capabilities that it will bring both for Police and Fire,” City Manager Bill McDaniel said. “The old days of going out and finding somebody’s building, and asking them if you can run around in it and do your tactical training in it, and everything else—those are long over. We need dedicated facilities. We need the ability to change scenarios. We need to be able to train on certain tactics in a secure setting. The Fire Department needs the ability to do bar to bar training where they actually have smoke that they can put their people into to simulate the real conditions that they will encounter in the field. This facility will allow us to do all of that. It will also have an onsite classroom, because you don’t just run out there and start leaping into action and doing things. You train on the techniques and the procedures that will be used in a particular scenario, then you go out and practice them.”
Currently, Plant City Fire Rescue and the Police Department train at other departments’ facilities, but transporting staff and equipment is time-consuming and otherwise inefficient. Also, to coordinate schedules with other municipalities is unreliable. “It just doesn’t provide the same effectiveness as having your own training facility right here in our city,” McDaniel said. “This is something that I believe we’ve needed for some time, and we put it in the budget. We have been working toward it, and I am very excited to see this project come to fruition. It will give both of our public safety departments a tremendous elevation in their capabilities to train and prepare themselves for what they are asked to do out on the street every single day. If you want the best, you have to provide them with the best training.”
The city’s Engineering Department has been working hard to get this project completed as quickly as possible. Since the construction is at the conceptual and engineering design phase, the groundbreaking date has not yet been established, so the completion date isn’t set, either. But since the commissioners voted to move forward with the project, the day is coming.
