News
Athens’ new feature-rich fire station has been a long time coming
By: David Forster
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ATHENS, Ohio (WOUB) — Athens Fire Chief Bob Rymer has waited a long time for this.
“They’ve been coming into my office, ‘Hey chief, when we getting a new station? Hey, when we getting a new station?’” he said, nodding to the firefighters gathered off to his right.
“Finally, I just had to pick a date. I said June ’24. I’ve been saying this since before Covid. June ’24. Don’t you worry about it. We’ll get it taken care of. Well, here we are on the 151st day of June, and we finally have a station.”
The ribbon-cutting ceremony for the new station, located on Stimson Avenue just before it crosses over the Hocking River, was followed by a tour of the facility.
It’s nothing like the old one.
“This is a 100-year building,” Andy Stone, the city’s service-safety director, told the crowd. “We built this for Athens far into the future. So when you look at it and you say, ‘Wow, that’s an impressive fire station,’ that’s why. We were building for the future with this building.”
Fire trucks have grown much bigger and heavier over the years, and when firefighters back them into the engine bay, the building shifts and bits of concrete sometimes crumble away from the support beams.
The new station would be right at home on the Ohio University campus with its brick structure and the white cupola that tops the station’s training tower.
That training tower is one of many features in the new station that were lacking in the old one. It’s outfitted with windows on different floors so firefighters can practice setting up aerial and ground ladders. They can practice rappelling down its side for rope rescues and hauling fire hoses up and down the interior stairwell, which until now they’ve had to do at the city parking garage.
“So ultimately that training tower just allows us to get better at everything we do,” said firefighter Quintin Lott, who led one of the tours. “We are expected to know anything from fires to rescuing somebody out of a river. There’s nothing that we can’t do. But the thing is, you have to practice doing it otherwise you’re not going to be able to get the job done. So it’s huge.”
The new station was also built to improve the firefighters’ own health and safety. For example, it has an exercise room.
“The thing is with our station right now, we don’t have any room to exercise and something the fire service as a whole right now is really pushing is mental and physical fitness,” Lott said.
There’s also a room for firefighters to store their gear. At the old station, it’s stored in the engine bay where it can be contaminated with exhaust from the fire trucks as they move in and out. This has been linked to cancer.
The new station is also outfitted with a state-of-the-art exhaust system for sucking fumes out of the engine bays.
At the old station, the firefighters’ beds are all squeezed into one room. The new station has five bedrooms that will accommodate three beds each with plenty of room to spare. This not only allows for more privacy but also will make it easier to accommodate female firefighters down the road, Lott said.
And there are poles, shiny brass ones for firefighters to slide down for quicker access from one floor to another.
“I haven’t even gone down the poles yet,” Lott said.
Construction workers are still wrapping up some of the final touches so firefighters can move in and start operating out of the new station, which is expected to happen by the end of the week.
Lott worked for two other departments in southeast Ohio before joining Athens a year and half ago. He said he has no plans to leave until he retires in 30-plus years.
Mayor Steve Patterson joked this was all part of Rymer’s master plan.
“I think what Chief Rymer is really trying to do is make this such an interesting, comfortable place that the firefighters are never going to want to go,” he said. “Families will start moving in here. We may have to turn it into short-term rental at some point in time, chief, but that’s up to you.”
The new station’s location just down the road from the highway interchange also provides firefighters with easy access to all parts of the city and is expected to improve response times.
Patterson credited former City Planner Paul Logue, who died last year, for working hard to get community buy-in on the location.
“Paul was magical in how he was able to bring people together, especially when we had the early conversations about where the fire station headquarters should go, what it should look like,” Patterson said. “Does response time really matter? Yes, it does really matter, and this was the perfect site for that.”
Lott credited Rymer for the work he put into making the new station a reality after 31 years of waiting.
“We were in here earlier and he was talking to all of us, just thanking us, and he got pretty emotional in there,” Lott said. “He’s worked his butt off for everything that we got. … It’s countless hours. Nobody knows outside of the Fire Department. Nobody knows how much he’s put into this place.”