October 22, 2023
By: Dwayne Page
The new Liberty Fire Hall is on schedule to open by November 1.
Described by County Fire Chief Donny Green as a district station, the fire hall sits on an 8.65 acre site in the city limits of Liberty owned jointly by the towns of Liberty and Dowelltown and once used as a recreation park off Highway 70 on West Main Street. Leaders of both towns earlier this year entered into a 99-year lease agreement with the county to use this property for the fire hall which is 55’ x 60’ in size and has bays to house a fire truck, tanker, brush truck, and an ambulance. A helipad will also be added on site for the landing of helicopter ambulances when needed.
The county allocated $382,912 in American Rescue Plan Act funding for the construction and Tim Pedigo was awarded the bid to build it. A ribbon cutting will be held soon to officially commemorate the opening of the new fire hall which is expected to improve firefighting and EMS services in the western portion of the county. Under the plan the current Liberty Fire Hall located in downtown Liberty is to be replaced by this new fire station. According to the 2020 US Census, the total population in the two districts that primarily make up the western portion of the county is as follows: District 1: Total Population- 2,860; and District 2: Total Population 2,691.
“Our plan is to go online November 1. We plan to have a ribbon cutting hopefully coordinating with the Chamber and we will invite officials out from both Liberty and Dowelltown and the DeKalb County governments as well as the community to come out and see what the facility looks like,” said Chief Green.
“We are going to refer to this (new Liberty Fire Hall) as a district station because it’s a concept we are trying to move toward to have a station like this in each of our county’s three fire districts. We already have one district station at our Main Station on King Ridge Road. With this district station, the fire hall will house a fire engine, 2,500 gallon tanker to haul water to a fire scene, and a brush truck. This particular station, because its on the western end of the county will also have the availability to house an ambulance if EMS so chooses to do that,” he continued.
“This fire hall has three bays across the front of the building with a smaller rear bay accessible from the side of the building for the brush truck. We already have all of these vehicles. This project does not require us to purchase any new vehicles. They are all here so we’re not looking at additional purchases,” Chief Green explained.
“The facility has a restroom along with what we are referring to as a day room which is like an office or sitting room so that if an EMS crew is here the room could be furnished with a couch, chair, and TV to have a place for them to standby and it will also give us room if we have a meeting here. That room will be for use by the fire department and EMS,” said Chief Green.
“This project allows us to distribute the equipment we already have more evenly across the county. It lets us put a tanker on this end of the county. Before we only had a tanker at the main station. This is important because rural water supply is always an issue with not a lot of hydrants. We’ll also get to put a brush truck down here. We have two brush trucks right now and those are at the main station. We will put one of them, the smaller four-wheel drive brush truck here. That will allow us to get into some of these tighter areas and during inclement weather when roads are bad, it’ll give us more access especially with the four-wheel drive capability,” Green explained.
“The existing Liberty station that we have been in since 1975 in downtown Liberty has served us well for many years but we have outgrown it. That facility is very small and the new equipment is bigger. We have had challenges of just getting our fire engine in there. It is a single bay. This new fire hall will give us much more room to work with. It will also serve as a district training center to bring all of our stations in the district to this location. We have the grounds outside to do outside training if we need to and we also plan to put a helipad here. We have lots of room here to put a helipad for a medical aircraft to do a landing zone. It gets it off the highway in a safe location that we can control. We currently use the West School campus for that but the issue there is when school is in session there is heavy traffic and children are present and that can be dangerous at times,” said Chief Green.
As for an ambulance, County Mayor Matt Adcock told WJLE Thursday night that a day truck will initially be put at the fire hall once its opened with a goal of eventually putting a 24-hour Advanced Life Support (ALS) truck with paramedics there.
The main issue with a day truck, according to County Mayor Adcock, is that it could only be at the fire hall during day truck hours ( 8 a.m. until 8 p.m.) and even when it is stationed there, the day truck would likely be on the road most of the time transporting patients back and forth to doctors’ appointments, nursing homes, and for other convalescent calls so the day truck might be out of the fire hall more often than in it.
“What we are going to try to do is put a paramedic on a day truck there (new Liberty Fire Hall). It’s going to be a day truck ambulance for now. I want to try to make it a 24-hour thing. I told Hoyte (EMS Director Hoyte Hale), I really don’t like and I wish they (EMS) had not made a decision to do a day truck there but instead a 24-hour truck because our day truck only has EMT’s on it. They can’t provide advanced life support like our other ambulances. We mainly use the day truck to do our nursing home stuff, doctors’ appointments, etc. If there is no paramedic, they will still have to wait for another truck to arrive at the scene. What we will try to do is put paramedics on the day truck, but we still haven’t worked that out yet. The goal is to make it a 24-hour ALS truck,” said County Mayor Adcock.
“If we cannot acquire paramedics on the day truck, we may have to keep a 24-hour truck at the Liberty Station till after 9 p.m., then it will have to return to the EMS main station because there are no sleeping quarters at the Liberty Station. We will find a viable solution to make sure that the Liberty Station will receive a truck with a paramedic on it to make it ALS (advanced life support). We want to provide the best form of protection for this community. In the future, we hope to construct sleeping quarters at the new station to have coverage 24 hours a day,” added County Mayor Adcock.
The county EMS operation currently has two Advanced Life Support 24/7 crews (24 hours per day, 7 days per week) and one Basic Life Support 12/7 (Day Truck) crew (12 hours per day, 7 days per week). Essentially, the county has three staffed ambulances but only two are staffed 24 hours per day every day and the other is staffed for 12 hours per day every day. The county has five ambulances in the fleet including two back up units but two of the five ambulances have been down lately due to repairs. According to Director Hale, those two units are expected to be back in service by later this week.