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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Spokane Valley Fire Department opens new shop facility

Fleet Operations Supervisor Josh Evans talks about the new Spokane Valley Fire maintenance facility on March 30.  (Kathy Plonka/The Spokesman-Review)
By Nina Culver For The Spokesman-Review

The Spokane Valley Fire Department recently opened a brand new shop facility on eight acres it owns at Barker Road and Garland Avenue, creating a building actually big enough to house the fire engines the mechanics are fixing.

The old shop on North Sullivan Road on the edge of the Spokane Valley Industrial Park was built in 1992, in an age where fire engines were shorter. Its bays were 60 feet long. Valley Fire has three tiller ladder trucks that are 62 feet long.

Many times the engines were worked on outside, but in bad weather, the shop would have to have tools and equipment shoved into corners and crevices or moved outside so that the trucks could be angled to fit inside, Fleet Operations Supervisor Josh Evans said. “They just wouldn’t fit in the building.”

The seven drive-through bays in the new shop are 80 feet long, leaving plenty of room for both fire engines and equipment. “The nice thing here is the space,” Evans said. “It’s a safer working environment.”

The maintenance shop maintains and repairs 12 front line fire engines plus five reserve engines. They also service the department’s technical rescue equipment, brush trucks and staff pickup trucks. They also build shelves and other equipment for new fire engines that are purchased.

The shop was paid for by levies approved by voters, said Administrative Service Division Chief Jeff Bordwell. Like all department projects, it was paid for up front without incurring debt. “It was put in the five-year plan and our fire department, with assistance from the citizens, were able to put it in the budget,” Bordwell said.

The new shop was budgeted to cost $7 million, but that quickly increased to $9.2 million, driven in part by higher prices and supply shortages, Bordwell said. There are some things the department ordered a year ago that still haven’t arrived. “With COVID and the resource issues, it went up fast,” he said of the price.

The department owned a parcel of land further south on Barker for a decade that was slated to become a fire station. About two years ago, that land was sold, and the larger parcel at Barker and Garland was purchased to house the maintenance shop, a new fire station and a training tower. Construction on the training facility should start this summer and is expected to take two years, Bordwell said.

The new station, which will be the 11th one in the district, probably won’t be built for another four years because the demand isn’t quite there yet, Bordwell said. “You can see the area is growing, but we’re not seeing the run volume yet,” he said.

The new maintenance facility includes a 5-ton crane to lift engines out of trucks and other tasks, replacing a 2-ton crane at the old shop. There’s a system to capture vehicle exhaust and hoses that drop from the ceiling that pump oil, grease and other liquids. There’s also an automotive hoist that can lift a brush truck carrying a full load of 400 gallons of water.

Four of the drive-through bays are in regular use, while the other three are used to park reserve engines and for storage, providing space for future expansion.

While construction on the training facility hasn’t begun yet, the site is already used for some training. There’s a huge concrete pad nearly as large as a football field where firefighters can be trained to drive the fire engines.

The department was using various parking lots around town, but the heavy fire engines would destroy the pavement over time, Evans said. More recently the department was using a concrete runway at Fairchild Air Force Base for their driver training.

Normal parking lot asphalt is only two to three inches thick, and that’s why it would be damaged by the engines, Evans said. The pavement around the maintenance shop is seven inches thick, and the concrete pad is so big that it took 170 truck loads of cement poured over three weeks to build it.

A public grand opening celebration is planned at 10 a.m. on April 19. Evans said he and his staff are looking forward to putting the new facility to good use. “It’s going to be really nice to catch up on the stuff we’ve been putting off,” he said.