A consultant in Burlington’s employ has recommended that the city add three new fire stations, and relocate one of the six it already has, in order to optimize the response times of its fire department.
These four proposed changes are the big takeaways from this comprehensive firehouse analysis which Greg Grayson of NC Fire Chief Consulting has conducted on behalf of Burlington’s fire department as part of a routine evaluation of the department’s brick-and-mortar facilities.
This study, which was shared with Burlington’s city council on Monday, is the first citywide review of fire station locations in more than a decade, according to Burlington’s fire chief Matt Lawrence.
“Our last fire station location analysis was in 2011,” Lawrence explained during a city council work session that evening. “Since that time, our landscape has changed drastically with the city’s growth, while our service demand has grown as well…Our goal with this is to provide equitable services no matter where you are in the city of Burlington…But in order to do that, we need to have our assets in the right places.”
Lawrence recalled that the department’s previous location analysis had identified gaps in coverage on the city’s southwestern fringes as well as the area between the department’s headquarters in downtown Burlington and Holly Hill Mall, which is home to another heavily-used firehouse.
The city council went on to address the first perceived insufficiency by approving a new fire station – the city’s sixth – which opened for business near the entrance to the Mackintosh on the Lake subdivision in 2016. The other area of spotty coverage has remained unaddressed, however, and it resurfaces in Grayson’s recent analysis.
The proposed relocation of the station near Holly Hills Mall is one of the four primary recommendations of the consultant’s study. Grayson also calls on the city to add three brand new facilities – one at Springwood Park to serve the city’s westernmost reaches; a second on Burlington’s northern periphery, and a third, “dual-use” on Grand Oaks Boulevard whose service area would include the Burlington-Alamance Regional Airport.
Grayson told the city council that the basis for each of these four recommendations was hard data on things such as population density, emergency call volume, and land use. Particularly crucial to his analysis were the fire department’s response times – or at least the portions most affected by geography.
“The response time for Mrs. Smith,” the consultant explained, “is the time from when she dials 9-1-1 until the time that the fire engine is there. But the component we chiefly look at is travel time…and your first unit response time in Burlington is strong.”
Grayson added that, 90 percent of the time, the fire department is able to get its first unit to the scene of an emergency in 6 minutes 54 seconds or less. He added that this rate is commendably close to the “industry” guideline of 6 minutes 20 seconds. Grayson conceded, however, that Burlington’s numbers are much further behind the standard when it comes to getting a full complement of staff and equipment on site. Here, he said, it takes the fire department 13 minutes 30 seconds to achieve, in 9 out of 10 cases, what the industry guideline would meet in 10 minutes 20 seconds.
In order to decrease overall response times, Grayson said that the fire department should beef up its resources in outlying areas, such as Burlington’s extraterritorial jurisdiction as well as future corridors for growth. He also encouraged the city to cast about for potential funding sources to pay for staffing, equipment, and additional facilities.
But it was his specific suggestions for these facilities that comprised most of Grayson’s presentation to the council on Monday.
Of his four recommendations, the proposed station near Springwood Park was the first one that the consultant pitched to the council in detail – as well as the one that prompted the most discussion among city officials. In any event, Grayson said that this prospective facility would extend the fire department’s services far west of its current westernmost base near the entrance to Mackintosh on the Lake.
“Station six has filled an enormous void,” the consultant added. “But as [the city] has continued to grow west, the need has increased.”
Burlington’s mayor Jim Butler went on to observe that the city currently pays the Whitsett rural fire department $60,000 a year to provide the primary response in areas of Burlington that lie within eastern Guilford County. Butler added that the city would be well advised to establish its own presence on the other side of the Guilford-Alamance line even though it may be cheaper, in the short-term, to continue contracting with Whitsett.
“That is the most critical area I saw reading through this [study],” he added, “based on our growth corridors.”
Lawrence, meanwhile, told the council that there’s land across the street from Springwood Park’s entrance where the city could potentially establish this Guilford County facility.
Grayson went on to encourage the council to relocate the station at Holly Hills Mall to the east in order to reach areas that are too far from the headquarters station for a consistently timely response. Lawrence acknowledged that, at one point, the fire department toyed with Saddle Club Road as a potential site for this relocation, although he conceded that there’s no “solid solutions” to this particular challenge.
City officials were equally vague about a possible site for a new station on the city’s northern frontier. They were more confident about the proposed dual-use facility, which Grayson said could be developed on Grand Oaks Boulevard to provide quick service to the grounds of the airport.
In general, Grayson said that the city will need about three acres of land and between $10 million and $12 million in funds to develop each new station on a footprint of 10,000 to 15,000 square feet. With this in mind, Harold Owen, Burlington’s mayor pro tem, acknowledged that the city will have to work incrementally to address the consultant’s proposals for the fire department.
“There are multiple stations that will probably need to be constructed,” Owen insisted, “and this is something that could go over a period of time…depending on the growth of the community.”
