BALTIMORE, Md. – The best way to learn about how to build a fire station is by listening to those who have been there, done that and got the political battle scars to prove it.
During Firehouse’s Station Design, co-located with FireExpo in Baltimore, a panel of fire officers shared their successes and not so successful experiences with an audience during a presentation called “Lessons From the Real World.”
The in the panel were Craig Carter, AIA, LEED AP BD+C, National Lead Fire Station Designer, BKV Group, Chicago, Ill.; William Pearson, Captain, Atlanta, Ga., Fire Rescue; Curt Pronk, Administrative Services Manager, Rochester, Minn., Fire Department and David Hartman, Hartman Fire Station Consultants, Palmyra, Va. Hartman was the owner’s representative during the construction of the Charlottesville, Va., fire station. He had a 32-year career with the Charlottesville Fire Department.
Carter acted as the moderator of the session and asked the three panelists for their “Time Sucks, Money Pits and Political Potholes.
And the three guest had plenty and some were very vocal with their frustrations.
Pearson said the new Atlanta mayor promised to reopen a 1910 fire station that was “blacked out” in 2007 just as the economy tanked.
He said the project so far has cost in excess of $3.5 million, is many months past due for opening and even when it will open, it can’t accommodate the new trucks – it’s too small.
“It would have been cheaper to bulldoze it and built something new that will work for us,” Pearson said, noting the building will be an EMS satellite and there’s already talk of building a new station just down the road from Station 7, the one that’s undergoing renovations.
Politically plugged in leaders in the city are requiring the single-paned windows be rehabilitated at the cost of $60,000, when new ones, double-paned and more efficient, while looking just like the originals, could have been installed for considerably less.
Also Station 7 has a natural stream that runs under it, dumping 134-gallons per hour through the basement, Pearson said, noting that the basement is made out of granite making it difficult, if not impossible, to install any kind of waterproofing.
Pearson also said that the Station’s bricks were once repointed with a hard concrete which means the bricks are now bear the stress of the building and are losing integrity. It will be expensive to remedy that problem.
Carter said the lesson from Station 7 is sometimes it will cost more and be much less efficient, to renovate a fire station than build new.
But Pearson’s problems didn’t stop with Station 7. He said a brand new station ended up requiring new concrete poured because an in experienced architect didn’t understand the angles of approach and the apron in front of a brand new station wouldn’t handle the tiller aerial. And, Pearson told them it wouldn’t
“They wouldn’t listen, so we did the drive test after it was all done and you could hear the bottom of the tiller scraping,” he said simulating that nerve jarring noise of metal scraping on concrete.
That mistake cost $300,000, Pearson said, adding that the architectural design firm was smart enough to have a clause in their contract stating that “if anything went wrong they couldn’t be held liable.”
The take away from that experience, Carter said, is check out the credentials of the architectural firm that’s going to design your station and carefully watch the inexperienced ones to make sure those kinds of errors don’t happen. And, when they do, don’t hesitate to do “the drive test” to make sure the apparatus fits and the site accommodates them as designed before accepting the building.
Pearson wasn’t the only one with stories to share. Hartman had a few of his own too.
When Charlottesville decided to build a new station, the first one in decades, Hartman said it picked a less than ideal site.
“If you keep driving by a lot for a long time, and no one has bought it, there’s a reason,” Hartman said.
The site was so sloped it too, 2,000 dump truck loads of material to fill the site, Hartman said. And to make sure the fill dried and compacted properly, the entire top was tilled every few days for three months, he said, that proportionally delayed construction.
Carter said it’s important to do archeological studies of any property earmarked for a fire station should be done early in the process.
Hartman also had experiences with the firm drilling wells for a geothermal climate control system. Deeper drilling was required than specified and the contractor needed to use lubricating soap to drill deeper. Residual soap was found in a stream behind a college professor’s home and Hartman said he tried to shut down the drilling before the professor pushed the issue further.
“I told them they had to shut it down and they told me it was ok,” Hartman said. He added the professor called state officials and they ordered the project shut down pending further investigation.
Ultimately, the drilling stopped and the contractor was able to make the drilled wells work, but not as efficiently as they were originally designed, Hartman said.
Pronk, the Rochester, Minn., administrator, had different issues that sucked time and money from his project.
He said the site chosen for a new station was brokered by a local bank and ended up needing the annexation of a few other lots to make it work. One, a 19,000 square foot triangular shaped lot was need to complete the site.
Assessors went out to view the site and determined the $100,000 for the 19,000 odd shaped lot was way out of line, Pronk said, noting that it took some persuasion to get the owner to sell it for a more reasonable price that he did not reveal.
An issue with a local excavating company wound up costing $35,000 for work that wasn’t done, Pronk said. He explained there were only two local excavating companies and they happen to be brothers. The brothers were saying there was far more ledge on the property than anyone had originally anticipated because they had experience with digging in the area and knew what they were talking about Pronk said.
A $110,000 contingency was put in place and when the ledge problem didn’t materialize, the town couldn’t get all of its money back because of the way the contract was worded, Pronk said. He noted the contractor walked away with an extra $35,000 because there was no clause that said he had to give it all back if the ledge wasn’t there.
Carter said the lesson learned is that no matter how much you like to do business with a handshake based on trust, it’s usually better have it spelled out in a contract that has all the “I’s dotted and the t’s crossed.”
Pronk also had political elements to deal with too including two local advisory boards that had sprung up while the station was being built. One was a green committee and the other was a design committee, neither of which existed existed before the fire station was planned. The were pretty much perfunctory committees, but they did require some additional time to get them considered by the brand new boards.
Carter said the best way to succeed at building a solid, good new fire station is to think positive thoughts.
“You have to have the appropriate mind set,” Carter said. “That’s one of the secrets to success. You have to be open minded.
