Bob Mitchell, the Albany County architect who designed the new consolidated Beacon fire station, corrected me when we spoke over Zoom this week. I had toured the under-construction station on April 26 and remarked that I was impressed with the facility’s many bells and whistles.
“Bells and whistles” suggest extravagance, Mitchell said. The firefighters are actually getting “nuts and bolts — spaces that are highly functional and necessary.”
The $14.7 million, 16,400-square-foot structure, which is on schedule to be completed by September, will have three bays for fire trucks on Wolcott Avenue, across the street from City Hall. There will be two more bays on South Avenue — which had fronted the former Lewis Tompkins Hose Co. station — one for a backup fire truck and the other for Ambulnz, the city’s advanced life support ambulance provider.
City leaders in 2022 decided to gut, refurbish and enlarge the 1979 Tompkins Hose building, ending a nearly 20-year debate over consolidating Beacon’s three aging stations — Tompkins Hose, Mase Hook and Ladder on Main Street and the Beacon Engine firehouse on East Main Street, none of which met modern firefighting standards.
Rather than build a station at a new site, Mayor Lee Kyriacou pushed to renovate Tompkins Hose, a decision that he said this week cut costs significantly and allowed the city to “do something state-of-the-art that will last a few generations.” He said a renegotiated 10-year sales tax-sharing agreement with Dutchess County, reached in 2022, also helped. The deal brought Beacon an extra $1.2 million in revenue last year, and the numbers could triple over the life of the agreement.
The all-electric station, heated and cooled by 20 geothermal wells dug in the adjacent parking lot, will have six bedrooms, each equipped with four lockers. That means each firefighter will have a private locker for their 24-hour shift, and the six rooms gives the department, which has 17 paid “career” firefighters plus Chief Tom Lucchesi, ample room to grow.
The partially enclosed engine bays will be enlarged and equipped with an exhaust-removal system that will connect to the trucks. There’s even a simulated manhole inside the station where firefighters will practice subterranean rescues.
Perhaps the most important upgrade will be the decontamination facilities. When returning to the station, firefighters will enter a three-step “hot zone” designated for cleaning. There will be a “gross decontamination” room to surface-clean their gear, then another room with deep-cleaning laundry machines and dryers, and then showers. After those safety measures, firefighters can go into the “cool zone,” which is the rest of the station.
There’s more data these days on the effects of the toxins concentrated in smoke that firefighters inhale, ingest or absorb through the skin. For example, Mitchell said, the rate of testicular cancer among firefighters is twice the national average. He also cited the recent case of three children of firefighters at the same station in Honolulu who, over a six-year span, developed Ewing’s sarcoma, a rare bone cancer.
“Ultra-fine particles in smoke pass through protective garments and into the skin,” Mitchell said. “They have to be washed off quickly, because if that dust is on them or their clothing, it goes home with them.”
For previous generations, facilities like these didn’t exist. “When my dad was a volunteer firefighter, he would just throw his gear in the back of the car,” City Administrator Chris White told me. “There was no place to go.”
The lobby and interior spaces of the building will pay tribute to “the spectacular volunteer effort” to fight fires and handle other emergencies in Beacon over the past century, Kyriacou said. The U.S. flag and a memorial to fallen volunteers will be moved from South Avenue to the front of the station on Wolcott.
The brick exterior is envisioned as a gateway to the city. “We asked the architect to look at Main Street and make this look like it was part of old Beacon,” White said, noting that public tours will be given in the fall. “It was important for us to have a building that’s stately and adds to the neighborhood.”
And it’s being built to last. “It has not been the tradition in the U.S. to build permanent buildings,” Mitchell said. “But we do not want to burden our grandchildren. We want them to know that we were wise to make a building that was designed to last indefinitely, not to be a throwaway.”
