KINGSTON – Officials broke ground Thursday on a new central fire station for the Kingston Fire Department.
The $8.8 million project will be located at 18 East O’Reilly Street across the street from the current firehouse.
The new facility will also include an emergency operations center “and is advancing our sustainability goals as our first municipal building to have both geothermal and photovoltaic energy saving infrastructure,” said Mayor Steen Noble.
The existing station was built in 1908 for horse drawn fire apparatus and is not serving the functional and technological needs of the fire department.
The property at 18 O’Reilly has two integrated garages, office and storage space. The building will be adaptively reused as an active fire station that expands the existing station. Larger vehicles will operate from the new facility while smaller fire vehicles and ambulances will continue to respond from the existing building.
The new facility will also house the city’s emergency operations center and training rooms.
“This new facility will bring Kingston into the future,” said Fire Chief Chris Rea. “Not only will it allow us to continue providing optimum fire protection and EMS response, the new central fire station will also allow for growth.”
The new building will be ADA compliant, provide for wide apparatus bay aprons, 20 parking spaces, a 10-bed dormitory, 36-person training room, officer-in-charge room, radio room, kitchen and ready room for eight personnel, 1,000 square feet of stock/storage space, and 2,500 square feet two-bay secondary storage garage.
The project will be undertaken with a project labor agreement to employ the local workforce.
Construction is expected to take about 14 months to complete.
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