Airway Heights Fire Department moves into new Fire Station

The Airway Heights Fire Department is operating out of a new station after years of making do in a facility that was too small and missing many important features, including a decontamination room.

The doors of the new station at 1149 S. Garfield were opened to the public on July 4 for an open house to show off the facility to the public. People came and toured the station while families snacked on hot dogs and kids climbed inside the fire engines.

The station is housed in a portion of a building that will eventually include the police department, municipal court and City Hall offices. The remainder of the building is mostly an empty shell with a concrete floor, awaiting funding to renovate.

The Airway Heights Fire Department, which operates with a mix of paid employees and volunteers, has only one station to cover a 7.5 square mile area. The old station, located at 1208 S. Lundstrom Street, was a cramped affair. The truck bay was so small and the fire trucks parked so close together that the trucks had paint and body damage from open doors banging into them.

“It had been remodeled probably 10 times,” Fire Chief Mitch Metzger said of the 1960’s fire station. “The overall size of the fire station wasn’t big enough for our equipment.”

Firefighters need to clean and decontaminate their bunker gear and equipment after a fire and the old station did not have space for that. “It just laid on the floor of the bays and we’d hose them off and do the best we could,” Metzger said.

There was also no space for training. The office of the department’s training officer was a tiny closet with a hole cut in the wall for a window. The sleeping quarters, really just a room full of bunk beds, were upstairs, necessitating a long walk to the engine bay for calls in the middle of the night. The kitchen was very small.

“Studio apartments had bigger kitchens than our fire station did,” Metzger said.

The new station fixes all those shortcomings. It has special decontamination rooms, including showers, complete with ventilation to the outside. There’s a large training room that will be shared with the police department once their portion of the building is complete. The kitchen is large and spacious, with two stoves and three refrigerators. There are also eight small individual bedrooms where on-shift firefights can sleep, located down a hallway just a few steps from the engine bay.

The department’s EMS supplies are now housed in their own room instead of stacked on shelves hung above the fire engines in the truck bay. Another new feature is a laundry room with two washers and one dryer, with one of the washers reserved only for dirty gear. There’s a large day room for firefighters off the kitchen that is spacious enough for eight comfortable chairs. The old day room was so small that four recliners could only fit if they touched each other, Metzger said.

Though the station is so new that most of the art hasn’t yet been hung on the walls, there is one element of the old station there. A large square table sits in the firefighter work area that was carefully carried over from the old station. It’s where firefighters ate their meals and did their training, the one spot they could gather. It couldn’t be left behind, Metzger said.

“This is where everything happened for 20 years,” he said.

It’s been apparent for years that the department needed a new station, Metzger said. The city started discussing passing a bond to pay for a new station in 2023. A few months later, Metzger spotted the building on Garfield, which had been built in 2019 but never occupied.

“It was just a shell, basically,” he said. “Once we passed the bond, we were able to purchase the building.”

Purchasing and renovating the building was cheaper and faster than building a new fire station from scratch, Metzger said. Construction started on the station improvements last summer. “We did have to upgrade the structure,” he said.

The city has the funds to design the improvements to the rest of the building, but there is no funding to pay for the additional renovations yet, Metzger said. The city will be looking for grants and other funding opportunities, he said.

The city’s old fire station is for sale and money that comes from that will be used to help renovate the rest of the building, Metzger said. The building does have enough offices for the city’s planning and building department and their old building has already been sold.

The new station also has amenities that will benefit the city and the public in the future. The station has an exam room where they can help people who walk in off the street with a health issue. There is also a large weight and exercise room that will be shared with the police department. “We designed with the future in mind,” Metzger said. “We put a lot of thought into how can we share this space.”

The new station is an important part of the department being able to respond to the rising number of calls. The number of calls the department receives annually has increased by 172% over the last decade, driven by the expanding population.

Metzger is grateful that his department has a station that was designed for the next several decades. “This was a big step for us,” he said.