Columbia is replacing a crumbling fire station. Will it mean more trucks?
The nearly 50-year-old building that houses a downtown-adjacent Columbia Fire Station has been crumbling for years. The station at 1015 Ferguson St., between Assembly Avenue and the Olympia neighborhood, was built as a floral warehouse in the 1970s and converted into a fire station in the 1990s.
After years of talking about renovations, the station is finally being replaced. The city of Columbia is looking to spend approximately $12 million to build a new station, as the area in and around Olympia swells with new student rentals and other construction. At least some of that cost will be paid by federal Community Development Block Grant dollars.
“The current station is a real mess,” said Viola Hendley, a community leader in the Olympia neighborhood and a longtime advocate for replacing the station, which she said leaks and floods during heavy rain.
Are more trucks needed?
Beyond the station’s poor conditions are concerns that the single fire truck the station houses doesn’t provide the man power some say the area needs as student housing has swelled in and around Olympia over the last decade.
“With an influx of people and new construction, the City of Columbia must provide additional fire and emergency resources to the station’s service area to maintain the level of response capacity necessary to protect lives and property,” reads the city’s statement to prospective builders for the new station.
That statement continues, “With expansion of housing in the area, and the proximity to the University of South Carolina Campus, the City has chosen replacement of the station as a priority project … to bring more comprehensive emergency response capacity to this largely residential area.”
But at least in the short term, the new station won’t mean additional firefighters, which for years has stayed at five people, who make up one engine company and a battalion chief.
Michael DeSumma, a spokesperson for the Columbia-Richland Fire Department, said that in the future, the department will “review resources allocated to the station and adjust as needed to meet the needs of the community.” But for now, there won’t be any changes in the number of firefighters serving the roughly 2.5-mile radius city/county Station 2 is responsible for.
The fire department said it could not provide an average response time for the engine at that station, “since the locations Engine 2 responds to varies from call to call.”
Hendley said she’d hoped the construction of a new station would mean more firefighters.
“We need the fire house here, but we also need more personnel,” Hendley said, pointing to the ever-expanding supply of student housing, not only in Olympia but also around Williams-Brice stadium and new apartments on Huger, Assembly and other downtown thoroughfares.
Are the railroad tracks a problem?
In 2019, The State reported that Columbia City Council was eyeing the Olympia station for replacement, both because of its condition and because of its location, which is surrounded by railroad tracks and feeds onto Assembly Street, where traffic routinely backs up due to train traffic.
“It is outdated and in bad need of repair and in a bad location,” former Columbia Councilman Howard Duvall said at the time.
The new station won’t be moving far from the existing Ferguson Street location, but it will give the new station direct access to Bluff Road. It will also include room for potential future additions, including EMS vehicles.
DeSumma told The State that the railroad tracks aren’t a huge concern for the department.
“We deal with railroad tracks all the time, It’s just part of the job,” he said, adding that if there’s a major incident, multiple crews from different stations across the city would respond regardless.
The closest stations to the Olympia fire house are Station No. 9, on Devine Street just outside of Five Points, and Station No. 1, in downtown Columbia at the corner of Laurel and Barnwell streets.
Because the new station is being built on an adjacent site, the work shouldn’t disrupt the existing station’s ability to respond to emergency calls, DeSumma added.
In talking generally about emergency response times in Columbia, Mayor Daniel Rickenmann told reporters last week that he hopes eventually the fire houses will also be utilized for EMS calls.
“Long term, what I hope can happen, which is done in other cities, is that as we look to redo our fire houses, that we build an extra bay and you actually have EMS stationed just like fire, in quadrants, so that they can get to [faster] response times,” Rickenmann said.
