Susitna Valley to feature new fire stations

MAT-SU — The Susitna Valley is going through something of a fire station construction boom this summer.

Last week, the Mat-Su Borough broke ground on a new fire station in Caswell Lakes. It’s building three more in the Willow area.

One odd thing about the construction of the station in Caswell — it’s actually being built on the same property as the area’s existing fire station, or “warm storage facility” as the borough calls the small, sparsely appointed fire stations it sometimes builds in outlying areas.

“The warm storage was just a temporary fire station until we could get a real one built, and we had no idea that we would get the money that quick,” the borough’s director of emergency services, Dennis Brodigan, said. “We literally finished the temporary station last year, and the next thing we know Sen. (Mike) Dunleavy sponsored legislation to get us $2 million to build the new one.”

He said the temporary station will morph into an ambulance building.

Brodigan said there was talk of building the big permanent facility somewhere else, but Caswell is a funny service area, in that putting a station where it is now allows the borough to cover 96 percent of the area’s residents. Putting the new station there makes more sense, since it will see more use than a station somewhere else. But that 4 percent of Caswell residents hopefully won’t remain uncovered for long.

“The next warm storage facility that’s going up is going to go up at Mile 86 (Parks Highway),” Brodigan said. “At that point, we’ll have 99.9 percent of the population covered.”

The three stations in Willow are going up also with state money. Brodigan said they will be warm storage facilities, and they’ll be on Crystal Lakes Road, Four Mile Road and near Nancy Lake.

“Once we do that, we will have 100 percent of the Willow fire service area within five miles of a fire station,” Brodigan said.

The next move for Willow will be to replace its existing main fire station.

“The existing fire station up there is an old portable classroom from the school district, and it’s so old that we literally have people come in there who are much older than I am saying, ‘I remember this building. I went to grade school in this building’,” Brodigan said.

He said the borough has put money into fixing it up over the years, but it’s outliving its usefulness. It doesn’t have running water or restrooms. And the truck bays attached to it aren’t much better — they were built in the 1980s.

At the Caswell groundbreaking, Assemblyman Vern Halter said the fire station is just one more sign that the area is growing up.

“It’s fun for me, 35 years traveling up and down the Parks Highway, watching how Caswell’s character develops,” Halter said in a video filed at the ceremony and produced by the borough’s Public Affairs Department.

Caswell is actually the youngest borough fire department. Until 2008, when area residents voted to build the fire department, the area didn’t even have fire service. Homes that caught fire there had to be left to burn unless there was a life in danger.

But even once the fire service area was voted in, the borough had to do a lot of work clearing out red tape. Brodigan said that the plot of land they built on was one the borough had foreclosed on.

“It took two years to get that property going through the process of building a station,” Brodigan said. “It’s in a neighborhood that has a covenant that restricted the neighborhood to residential structures only.”

The borough needed a waiver to build a fire station. But although there was a homeowner’s association described in the covenant, there wasn’t actually a homeowner’s association with which to do business.

“We had to get a hold of the person that subdivided that entire area,” he said. “He lived down in the Lower 48, and nobody knew where he was.”

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