First steps taken in Fire Department remodel
The Bella Vista Fire Department has started remodeling Station 1, kicking off with a new coat of paint in the department’s training room.
Fire Chief Steve Sims said that the department intends to renovate the entire building, and has a budget of $100,000 to do so. Significant work, such as adding a shower and installing individual bedrooms, he said, requires state approval.
Everyone will have to sleep in the training room, he said, while the quarters are under construction.
Moreover, he said, in its current state the station has only one shower. With seven firefighters on a shift, he said, that shower can get backed up, particularly after a fire call. Moreover, he said, with the administrative staff during the day there can be as many as a dozen people working in the station, all sharing a single bathroom.
The work, he said, will be performed over the next few months.
“There are some of those things that we’re doing ourselves,” he said. “We try to do as much as we can to save the city money.”
Some people in the department, he said, work in construction on their days off, and they’re bringing that experience into the department to help out.
Battalion Chief Robert Hamilton said he’s among those who work on their off days, and he painted the break room.
Coating the four walls with a light gray paint, he said, took around 20 hours, between covering surfaces, prepping the walls, texturing the walls and, of course, painting them. There were some imperfections, he said, on the western wall, which he had to come back and fix. It would have been a much shorter process, he said, if that hadn’t happened.
“It’s never as easy as you think it’ll be,” Hamilton said.