New Lake Ozark fire station to cut down on response time

The Lake Ozark Fire Protection District has decided to expand a north shore station in a big way.

The agency is tearing down the old facility, and building a new, more usable one in its place.

More and more people are building on the north shore side of the lake, off of County Road W.

Firefighter Shane Merill said, “We run quite a few calls out this way and it’s very convenient having everything here and having somebody here so you don’t have all this traffic on the strip that you have to fight to get over here.”

With many businesses near the dam, it’s definitely a place where traffic builds up. It would be tough to drive a ladder truck across the two-lane bridge in an emergency.

“Sometimes it’s a battle, usually we just shut down and don’t run emergency across there because there is no where else for them to go, so we just shut down and go with the flow,” said Merill.

“With that dam, it basically cuts our district in two and whatever we can do to get our response time cut down here on the north shore, we’re looking at how to solve that and the easiest way to solve it was to fix this station and get a crew out here and get them assigned 24/7,” said Fire Chief Mark Amsinger.

Thanks to a bond issue passed in August 2012, the old fire station 3 was torn down and the new $900,000 facility was built in its place.

“We put one of our medic units down here that was on the strip, it’ll cut our response time down here on the north shore, also when we built this station we thought about the future and let it house more than just two people. It’s designed to house up to 6 people so in the future if we need to put another engine crew on, we’d have an engine crew out here.”

Now, that station has a much larger garage, weight rooms, living quarters, and even room to grow in the future.

The crew will be at the station next Sunday, July 27 from 1-3 p.m. for an open house so everyone can come look at the new facility.