Construction progressing nicely on new west Lethbridge fire station

He said construction is scheduled to be finished in early 2021, with the facility slated to open for operations shortly after. The budget for the project is $10.3 million.

The facility will be located on a new road in Lethbridge, Great Bear Boulevard West, located off McMaster Boulevard West. Residents may have noticed concrete blockades and construction crews at the edge of the new roadway.

“I don’t believe the road will be opening until the fire station opens,” Adams said.

“We will just keep it closed because this [the fire hall] is the only thing on the end of the [road] and they [city crews] still do have some spring work on the road part for landscaping specifically, so they’ll be working on that once the weather improves a bit.”

There is currently an active fire hall on the west side of Lethbridge. Fire Station #2 is located on Whoop-Up Drive and Jerry Potts Boulevard and was built in 1980. Back then, the population in the west was approximately 4,000. Today, the population is close to 40,000.

There are three stations on the east side of the city, with only the one in the west. The new facility will help meet the growing demands of emergency response in west Lethbridge.

“It’ll help all the citizens in Lethbridge for sure [during] a bigger fire event, but certainly on the west side, the Canyons and SunRidge, we’ll certainly be able to respond to them much quicker,” said Deputy Fire Chief Greg Adair.

He said the new site will house four to five staff, 24/7, who will respond to fire calls and EMS events.

There is currently one firetruck, ambulance and five people who work out of the Whoop-Up and Jerry Potts station. Adair added the new hall is being built with firefighter safety in mind.

“Firefighting is a very dangerous occupation and cancer is a real concern for our firefighters,” he said.

“As we designed this fire hall, we built it with that in mind to try and help protect our firefighters.”

He explained that the design will see the hall include a “clean side” and a “dirty side”.

“The living quarters is the clean side of the fire hall. That’s where people will reside and that’s where they will have their meeting rooms, their training rooms, their lunchroom,” he said.

“The firefighting equipment and apparatus will stay on the dirty side of the fire hall…not that it’s dirty over there, it’ll also be very clean and sanitary, but we try to separate that just for our firefighter safety.”

The new fire station is scheduled to open in 2021 (Photo: Lethbridge News Now)

Adair said they’ve hired 25 people for the new fire hall, and they are currently in the process of training.

“When this fire hall opens up, they’ll all be trained and ready to go,” he remarked.

“In addition to that, we’ve ordered the fire apparatus and all our firefighting equipment is on order and will arrive prior to this fire hall opening as well.”

Adair added that with fire response, time is critical, especially when it comes to the construction of newer homes.

“New homes burn much quicker than the older homes do, so by locating this fire hall here, we’ll be able to respond in a much timely fashion and we should have better outcomes and be able to protect our citizens that much better with the addition of this fire hall,” he said.

“Building construction has changed and they call it lightweight construction and that changed many years ago…they used to use two by 10 floor joints. Now they use an engineered truss system, which is basically particle board and glue, which burns much quicker.”

Jace Adams said the new station is 1,235 square metres, which is “about a 20 percent” increase on the current west side site.

“The bays are designed to handle the largest fire truck in the fleet, so it gives them a lot of flexibility on this site, so pretty much any fire truck in their fleet, they can handle in this building,” he explained.

Fire Station #2 will remain active once the new hall opens up in 2021.

by Justin Goulet

Construction progressing nicely on new west Lethbridge fire station

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