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New fire station will open Photo by Jim Craven Medford's fifth fire station, a 13,400-square-foot building at North Phoenix and Barnett roads, will house six engines and nine firefighters divided among three shifts. The addition of the station will improve response time to homes in Medford's east hills. Response times should improve By CHRIS BRISTOL It's big. It's roomy. But Medford's first new fire station in 25 years is no Taj Mahal with a garage. "This is just a fire station," says Larry Anderson, planning chief for the Medford Fire Department. "It's not for administration. It's not for office space. It's for firefighters and fire trucks." Located at Barnett and North Phoenix roads, the 13,400-square-foot station was built to improve response times -- and save lives -- in the city's fast-growing and hilly eastern frontier. Right now, the fire department estimates it cannot reach 46 percent of Medford's population in five minutes or less. The new station will push that figure down to 25 percent. And the fire department won't even need to hire more firefighters, Anderson says. Two crews occupy the Bear Creek Park station; one will make the move sometime next month. "It's a real big boost to our coverage," he says, "and we're doing it with the same staff we've had for 22 years." A dedication ceremony and open house is set for March 10. The last new station, at Keene Way Drive and Roberts Road, was built in 1975. Built at a cost of $2.1 million, including furnishings and architecture fees, the new station is much larger than the city's four other fire stations. It will be known as Station No. 6 because department headquarters at City Hall is traditionally counted as No. 1. The apparatus room (or garage) has three double-sided bays and is big enough to park up to six fire trucks. The room looks bigger than a full-size gymnasium, which makes sense if you need somewhere to park a 48-foot ladder truck. In addition to the usual amenities (dining room, kitchen, day room and classroom space), the new station also boasts facilities new to the fire department. For example, it has an exercise room and a locker room with a separate ventilation system for airing out and drying smoky and wet turnouts. The new station also has an EMS decontamination room (80 percent of service calls these days are medical) and another room for recompressing the firefighters' oxygen tanks. The living quarters feature eight bunk rooms, one for each firefighter. The city has no female firefighters, but a double-sided bathroom was built for the day that changes. In case of a natural catastrophe, the station has a generator that runs on natural gas. It has a propane-powered backup in case gas lines rupture. Although the station was designed to accommodate up to eight firefighters, it will have only three per shift initially, Anderson says. Anderson says that even with the new station, some outlying areas are still out of reach of the fire department's five-minute goal. The new station "will hit some of those places, but it won't hit them all," he says. "We'd have to put a station practically on every corner to guarantee 100 percent." Today's Edition : News | Sports | Business | Weather | Tempo | Classifieds Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 2000, Medford, Oregon USA