Boone County’s new Fire Station 8 offers major upgrades
Erika McGuire
BOONE COUNTY, Mo. (KMIZ)
Construction on the new Boone County Fire Protection District Station 8 is complete.
Work on Station 8, located on Route K in southern Boone County, began late last year. It is expected to be fully operating by Nov. 1, according to Boone County Fire Protection District Assistant Chief Gale Blomenkamp.
The new 13,000 square foot station replaces the current station, built in 1981, and sits directly next to the existing building. It offers several major upgrades to better serve both firefighters and the community.
The new building has a built-in training tower, a training room, workout space, a larger kitchen and six resident rooms.
Station 8 offers a total of four bays that are bigger compared to three bays at the current station.
“All of the bays at 60 feet wide or 60 feet deep, so they’ll all drive through bays, so when they come back from a call or when they go to a call, they’ll go out the front of the station, take a right or left on the truck but when they come back, they’ll drive all the way around,” Blomenkamp said. “They can actually just drive through here so we don’t have to back in and out of the station which makes it just safe and less room for error.”
Firefighter and EMT Ryan Renoe has been a firefighter with the fire protection district for over a year. He says the bigger bays are a great addition.
“We have to pull through the bays now that’s amazing,” Renoe said. “It’s pretty crammed in there right now, we know we’re all trained to know how to drive the trucks but it’ll be nice to not have to back them in just to go around and not have to worry about that,”
The training tower, is the first to be onsite at a Boone County fire station, Blomenkamp said. It is two-stories and allows firefighters to practice hose movements, standpipes and scape windows.
“We have a manhole so we can do tripod work, bringing people up through a manhole, simulate somebody going through a floor and trying to rescue them with a fire hose,” Blomenkamp said. “We can simulate it with smoke and we can actually use that for training.”
For Renoe, having the onsite training tower is the best way to improve skills.
“I think you can never train enough, especially in being a first responder, you’re always learning something, so just the ability to be able to say, ‘hey let’s do on the spot training, let’s prove our skills,’ it’s invaluable to have that ability and access to do that just to get better,” Renoe said.
The new resident rooms offer a hotel-like feel with more privacy compared to the current station. Firefighters who live at the station now live in a dorm style, with multiple people in one room.
Fire Station 8 currently offers a washer and dryer for firefighters to wash their gear but is located in the bays. The new station features a closed-off area to wash gear, as they can contain harmful chemicals that have been linked to cancer.
“So the way it’s set up, there’s a shower in there, we can clean out gear in one section. Keep that dirty gear over on that side of the bay,” Renoe said. “Then all our clean gear goes in that separate room and that’s keeping it compartmentalized and hopefully limiting you know of exposure that we as residents or other firefighters in the station have.”
The total cost of the project was approximately $4.7 million, staying under the $5 million budget approved through a 2023 bond issue. That includes about $500,000 in “soft costs” like appliances and furniture.
A decision has not yet been made regarding the future of the existing building, according to Blomenkamp.
Last year, Fire Station 8 responded to 579 calls of service.