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Frontiersman

WASILLA — The Central Mat-Su Fire Department has crossed another hurdle on the way to getting a new fire station on Fairview Loop.

The Mat-Su Borough Assembly this week approved $55,000 to buy land for the station. Borough Emergency Services Director Dennis Brodigan said once the property is in hand, staff will begin scrambling to have a station up and running as soon as possible.

Once the station is built, homeowners in the area could see the Insurance Services Organization rating for fire protection drop from 8 to 4, bringing substantial insurance savings, Brodigan said. The Borough is set to move, but there’s still another hurdle to clear; if there’s no water to be found on the site, or not enough, the Borough won’t buy the land.

Brodigan said that stipulation is meant to avoid the headaches the department incurred trying to find a suitable well on another site picked for a fire station on Knik-Goose Bay Road at Horizon Drive.

“In three attempts we’ve found minimal flow — under 2 gallons per minute and very muddy,” Brodigan said.

More research has shown neighboring lots have water flow that would be acceptable for a fire station, he said. The department is going to drill a fourth time in a corner of the lot closest to those wells in another attempt to tap into the aquifer everyone else is apparently using.

The water flow problem isn’t particular to Central or even the Borough, Brodigan said. In rural areas across the country, finding water to fill fire tankers is a chief concern for fire departments.

In the Valley, there are a handful of spots where adequate water access is not an issue, he said. Centralized, municipal water systems in Wasilla and Palmer provide more than an adequate supply to stations in areas served by the systems. In Wasilla there are fire hydrants, something few Borough communities can count on.

But in just about every other part of the Borough, fire responders have trouble finding serviceable supplies.

While the Knik-Goose Bay Road site has so far proved relatively dry, the last fire stations the Borough has built, at Church and Pittman roads in 2001, tap into a strong well, pumping water out at 200 gallons per minute, Brodigan said.

A number of stations have a large — usually 30,000 gallon or more — holding tank buried on the property to store water for tankers to pump from. Brodigan said station 62 at Mile 6.9 Knik-Goose Bay Road has one, as do the Willow, Sunshine and Big Lake stations.

The new station on Fairview Loop will have one as well, a 33,000-gallon tank. Since the Borough generally uses 3,500-gallon tankers, that’s enough for quite a few refills.

“We should really have holding tanks at every one of our fire stations,” Brodigan said. “It just, of course, adds to the expense of a fire station.”

The fire station on Fairview Loop will be the first built under Brodigan’s watch.

Properties neighboring the Fairview Loop site have wells proven to pump eight to 10 gallons per minute. Brodigan said that, coupled with a holding tank, would be adequate for the station’s needs. Wells also aren’t the Borough’s only sources of water. The Valley’s many lakes, streams and ponds also play a role.

In Butte recently, the department mapped available water bodies in preparation for a visit from a national inspection organization.

Brodigan said that’s going to be the standard in all Borough departments. The eventual goal is to input that data into computer consoles used by emergency dispatchers who can then direct fire tankers to an adequate nearby source of water.

The next step would be installing laptop computers in emergency vehicles with that information loaded, putting the maps at responders’ fingertips. The purchase of those laptops is at least two years out, Brodigan said.

“It’s just more technology to make us more efficient and to give us better quality service,” he said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.