A new fire home planned for Main
Published on February 5th, 2003
STONEHAM, MA - Town officials who recently unveiled the proposed site for a new 27,000 square foot fire station conducted promising meetings with several businesses located at the Main Street location, according to community developer Michael Gallerani.
"We have had meetings with two of the people and they were very cooperative and very willing to work with us. They understand this is an important piece of the community and said ‘if we need to get out of here we will,’" said Gallerani, who plans to meet with the third of five affected property owners later this week.
Town officials considered several other locations for the new emergency operations center, including the current Central street fire station and the old Central School on William’s street. However, those properties were determined to be too small to house the new building and required the seizure of too many residences and parking spaces. Gallerani first contacted the owners of properties located on the corner of Main and Spencer Streets in a letter last month. Since then, Gallerani has met with the Northeast Manufacturing Company and a private property owner in an attempt to work out an agreement that would prevent the town from using its power of eminent domain.
When built, the cavernous emergency operations center will be capable of establishing a regional command center with direct lines to surrounding communities’ police and fire departments as well as to power and utility companies.
"Unfortunately, we don’t just deal with fires anymore," said Stoneham Fire Captain Jim Mclaughlin. "God forbid we have a terrorist attack in Boston…but we have to be prepared for the possibility of a chemical or biological attack…The surrounding areas would be a mess and Stoneham is right in the middle of things."
Not only would the new station give Stoneham the capability to link up with surrounding communities in the event of an attack, the building will also include a training room for firefighters, something lacking at the current fire station.
"We have to keep up with what’s going on in the world. There’s no training room now and it’s vitally important to have one because we’re the first responders to emergency situations. If we don’t know what to do, we’re in serious trouble," said Mclaughlin.
Pointing toward the narrowing end of Central Street close to McDonough’s liquor store, Mclaughlin explains another reason why the town’s 86-year-old fire station needs to relocate.
"We recently responded to a call for a 3-month-old baby who stopped breathing and this end of the road was clogged with cars. Thankfully the driver of the fire truck was experienced enough to get through with about a half-inch of clearance," recalled Mclaughlin, who added that responding firefighters often lose valuable time performing three-point turns on the narrow road.
According to Mclaughlin, the weight and length of new-age fire trucks offer several problems to firefighters at the current station. Not only do the narrow roads force trucks to make time consuming three-point turns, but as the cracked and dented garage doorways illustrate, the garage offer very little clearance for exiting trucks.
But the garage doorways present a small problem compared to some of the current fire department’s other inadequacies, including a basement weight room lacking proper ventilation and surrounded by lead paint, no storage facilities for protective firefighting gear, paint-chipped ceilings that have been constantly reinforced to support the weight of fire trucks, and the lack of co-ed bathrooms.
While Gallerani couldn’t quote a price for the new emergency center, he did say that similar projects cost between $8-10 million. Ideally, Gallerani would like to see the station completed by 2005.
"This is probably the last piece of the puzzle on the municipal level," said Gallerani, who noted that the Police Department and several schools have been rebuilt over the last twenty years.
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