Fire District No. 2 moves into new home

KELLOGG — It took a little longer than anticipated, but crews from Shoshone County Fire District No. 2 are now working from their new home.

Appropriately located at 911 Bunker Ave., SCFD No. 2 Chief Mark Aamodt has been incredibly impressed with the new two-story station since his team officially moved in on May 5.

“It’s fantastic,” he said. “Crews are loving the station. They love the clean environment.”

It was in May 2018 that residents approved the $2,900,000 bond to replace the district’s more than 100-year-old former firehouse in uptown Kellogg. Construction on the new building began in July 2019 and was mostly finished up in April of this year.

On May 1, Kellogg Moving and Storage began moving the items from SCFD No. 2’s old home, starting with essential equipment.

While there’s still a significant amount of stuff to still be moved, crews have had everything they need to respond to calls from their new home since last week.

“There’s still a lot of stuff up there,” Aamodt said of the old firehouse. “We didn’t want to have everything brought down and have it piled up; getting in the way of construction crews still working.”

Due to a combination of ongoing construction and the pandemic, the new SCFD No. 2 firehouse is having itself a sort of “soft-opening” currently. While everything that is needed for emergency personnel to do their jobs is in place, work crews are still putting the finishing touches on some minor projects such as painting, landscaping and furnishing.

Even if all the work was completed though, the COVID-19 situation has forced Chief Aamodt to postpone the public open-house event he was planning on having in late May. If state regulations continue as planned, he is hopeful that the open house can be held in late June/early July.

In the meantime, SCFD No. 2 personnel will continue to put things away and get more acclimated to their new surroundings.

“Right now, our goals are to start putting things away in an organized manner and continue to bring stuff down from the old station,” Aamodt said.

In just the short time that crews have been inhabiting the new station, Aamodt has already noticed several improvements in his team’s efficiency.

The old firehouse at 14 W. Market Ave. suffered from a laundry list of insufficiencies and safety hazards that made it harder for firefighters to do their job. Included on that list was a lack of proper heating and ventilation.

Crews used to have to use space heaters in the winter to stay warm and rely on work-arounds to limit their exposure to vehicle exhaust, as it would be pumped right into the bay and into the rest of the building when the vehicles were started.

Equipped with modern heating/cooling and ventilation systems, these issues are now a thing of the past with the new firehouse.

“A crewman has already mentioned to me that it’s nice not waking up because of headaches from smelling exhaust and diesel throughout the night,” Aamodt said.

Another large improvement over the old house is that this new one is simply bigger.

Originally designed for fire trucks in the early 1900s, the old house’s front bay doors barely left enough room for crews to get out — sometimes not even cleanly. Even routine tasks for firefighters, such as getting gear on and climbing into an apparatus, were challenges at the old Kellogg station.

With a total square footage of 12,130 — 4,800 of it coming from the 60-by-80-foot apparatus bay — the new facility provides emergency personnel with plenty of room to safely gear up and roll out.

“The response we can get out of here has improved because we aren’t fighting with vehicle doors and banging them into the vehicle next to us,” Aamodt said.

For an easy mental picture, the apparatus bay can hold four rows of standard length fire engines across with two parked front-to-back in each row. The number of vehicles can change though depending on what is being stored (i.e. an ambulance is shorter than an engine, allowing more space).

Even the new building’s location gives it an edge over the old house, as it allows SCFD No. 2 quick access to the freeway and allows more room for vehicles to enter and exit.

Other features of the new firehouse include six, two-person bedrooms (and one single bedroom), an appropriately furnished kitchen/communal area, an office space next to the bay for report writing, a large training/community room, a fire sprinkler and alarm system, an extractor to properly clean turnout gear, and multiple fixtures that allow indoor training opportunities, such as a reinforced doorway on the second floor that allows for ladder/rope climbing drills.

The News-Press plans to host a live walk-through of the facility on Facebook in the coming weeks, once all the construction has been completed.

The old station in uptown Kellogg is the property of the city of Kellogg and has not been slated for a new occupant just yet.

Aamodt would like to send out a big thank you to the community for making this new, modern facility a reality.

The new firehouse can be reached by phone at 208-784-1188.