Progress made on new Boone County Fire Protection District station
BOONE COUNTY, Mo. (KMIZ)
Construction on the new Boone County Fire Protection District Station is underway.
According to the department's website, a new concrete foundation has been laid for the new four-bay station, and the station's framing is up.
Station 8 will include a built-in training tower, a dedicated training room, a workout space, study room, a communal lounge and six resident rooms.
Boone County Fire Protection District Assistant Chief Gale Blomenkamp said even though the department already has a training center on the north side of Columbia, the new training tower will be beneficial to multiple stations on the south side of town.
"This will allow them to do that [training] more readily and more easily," Blomenkamp said. "Then the neighboring stations down here like 14 and 15 and 12, it's close and so they can just run over here and do the same type of thing."
Blomenkamp says this will be the first station to have an onsite training tower.
"It's a two-story training tower that attaches to the base of the station itself, it'll have a window that we can, practice rescuing from and or making entry into a second floor of a home, we can ladder it," said Blomenkamp. "There's fall arrest anchor points so people don't fall while we're doing training, there's a stairwell inside, as well as a standpipe, so we can do a lot of different things in there."
The six new resident rooms will be "hotel-style" for firefighters, which Blomenkamp said could help with recruiting new firefighters.
"We have station residents in all of our stations and so we have volunteers that live there," Blomenkamp said. "When you give them a place to live and they have, 'creature comfort,' so to speak, that, rivaled what the University of Missouri is doing, or, you know, the apartment complexes that are being built all over town, we got to compete with that"
This Thursday, trusses are set to go in, weather-dependent. Blomenkamp said the department is hoping to have a roof of the building finished during the first week of December. Despite a few delays, the project is set to be finished next summer.
"We were delayed a couple of weeks leading into this, and we've had a few weather delays and that's, that's to be expected in this time of this time of year and in Missouri in itself so, July would be a great time to be moving in," Blomenkamp said.
The 13,000 square foot station is costing $5 million to construct. the project is being funded by the 2023 bond issue, which has been crucial for the Boone County Fire Protection District's Capital Improvement Plan, which started in 2021.
The new station is being built right next door to the current Station 8, which was built in 1982. Blomenkamp says they plan on selling or renting the current Station 8 because of the value of the building.
"There's value to that building for a lot of people, we've had a lot of interest in that building," Blomenkamp said. "And so, I would see us putting that thing on the market."
The department will be asking again for a no-increase bond issue in 2025 to pay to replace Fire Station 5 in Prathersville, the busiest fire station in Boone County, according to Blomenkamp.
The Boone County Fire Protection District is composed of 15 fire stations, a headquarters and a training center.
