Fort Hall breaks ground on a new fire station
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FORT HALL — Tribal leaders, firefighters and a congressman stood side-by-side and broke ground on a long-awaited community resource.
Work will soon begin on a new fire station for the Fort Hall Fire Department after its groundbreaking on Tuesday. The new station, which will be constructed at 70 Widowville Road, will be much-needed upgrade from department’s current facilities.
“This is a community building,” said Fire Chief Eric King in an interview with EastIdahoNews.com. “And we’re building towards the future.”
King is not the first Fort Hall fire chief to advocate for a new station. He said that at least his last six predecessors have tried the same thing.
Part of the reason why King said his department needs a new building is because the current facility isn’t just one building, but a “menagerie of different types of buildings, and none of them are connected,” King said.
“It makes it challenging the way we are set up right now,” King said.
The Fort Hall Fire Station consists of the main office, apparatus bays and barracks. The barracks are a manufactured home, and the apparatus bays are nearby pole barns, which creates a tripping hazard for firefighters rushing from one to the other.
Not only that, but the current apparatus bays don’t have enough space to fit all of the department’s vehicles. Every year, they have to winterize two to three of its vehicles, one of them being a water tender. If the department needs to use it in this condition, it adds extra time to its response.
The new fire station will allow the department to store almost all of its vehicles under one roof, and the barracks will also have capacity for two more firefighters to be on shift, allowing them to grow the staff.
The building will also have a training room that will fit up to 50 people, while the current station’s training room only holds the six firefighters on staff. King wants this building to be a community resource, so the department plans to hold classes on fire prevention and CPR certification.
“We want to get in there and help strengthen (the reservation) as a community wide project,” King said.
Someone else who spoke about the importance of planning for the future was Congressman Mike Simpson in his speech at the groundbreaking. In March 2022, Simpson announced $7 million in federal funding would go towards the station’s construction. These funds came from nearly $24 million from the FY22 Omnibus Appropriations Act, allocated for eight projects in Idaho’s second congressional district.
“You don’t build for today, you build for the future, so you’ve done it right,” Simpson said.
Simpson also spoke to how proud he was to be apart of making the fire station possible.
“This is really for the firemen, first responders, (who) we can never do enough work (for),” Simpson said. “If you want them to be able to do their job well, they have to have the facilities and the resources to do that.”
The project is scheduled to be nearly complete and available for the department to use by May 2026.