Fire Department Upgrades Station

The begins construction on a fire station expansion in East Palo Alto Thursday that will nearly triple the station's square footage.

Fire Chief Harold Schapelhouman said the district has been working to replace this fire station for the past seven years and expects to hire local residents for the endeavor.

“One of our goals during construction is to make sure our contractor employs local residents and that we focus on purchasing US-made goods such as steel, windows and doors and solar panels,” Schapelhouman said.

“We want this to be a station that will benefit the community, the Fire District, and be something we that we can all be proud of; it represents another step towards improvement of the City of East Palo Alto.”

This station is one of four stations in the fire district that need to be replaced, he said, as that many of them were built in the late 1940s and 50s. The district acquired the station at the corner of University Avenue and Runnymede Street in East Palo Alto in the late 50s.

It is 4,300 square feet and will be expanded to 12,000 square feet, featuring more storage space for equipment, an emergency operations center for the city and bigger crew quarters to enable the district to house in the future.

The stations are designed to do more than be office and storage space.

Firefighters in the district work 48 hour shifts and are expected to live on site during that time. The ones at the East Palo Alto station are some of the busiest in the fire district, responding to about 3,000 emergencies a year, according to the fire chief.

The fire district responded to a total of about 7,500 calls in 2011, according to John Wurdinger, vice president of the . About 200 of those were fires.

“If you don’t know what to do, you call 911 and guess who shows up? The firefighters,” Wurdinger said, noting the amount of things firefighters are expected to do has changed in the past 50 years. 

Firefighters respond to vehicle accidents, calls about flooded homes, medical calls, and fires, he said; fires consisted of about three percent of 911 calls in 2011.

The fire station expansion in East Palo Alto will be built directly behind the old facilities atop land where homes used to stand, and cost the fire district about $7.6 million. Firefighters will remain in the old station while the new one is being built. The new facility is expected to remain capable of supporting high-quality emergency responses for about 70 years.

Completion of the new facilities is expected to conclude in December of 2013, according to the Fire Chief.  The Menlo Park Fire Protection District Board of Directors will break ground on the project Thursday at 2 p.m.