A quick stop at Santa Maria Fire Station No. 1 between a flurry of rain-related calls on Dec. 11 turned up an emergency a little too close to home for firefighters.
After returning from a collapsed roof at a business on Skyway Drive and before the next call, Battalion Chief Ed Hadfield stopped at the station, only to find several inches of water had flooded the facility on Cook Street, Chief Dan Orr said.
The result: Firefighters have been evicted from the station for at least a month while restoration crews remove drywall, baseboards and cabinets to dry out the facility.
“The big concern, of course, is mold,” Orr said.
The storm drain in the parking lot couldn’t handle the huge downpour while leaves and muck covered a smaller drain on the back patio.
“There was no place for the water to go,” Orr said. “It was too much water.”
That night, fire crews in the city handled 41 calls for service in a 12-hour period.
“All the engines were out running,” he added.
Pre-existing drains in the bay where firefighting apparatus is housed meant water didn’t accumulate there.
“The app floor was perfect, but the living space got killed,” he said. “So now we deconstruct because it’s all about getting to wherever water can go.”
Instead of housing fire engines, the bay now is filled with boxes of supplies, mattresses and bed frames while Re+New Restoration crews work inside the living quarters.
Officials estimated at least 4 inches of water filled the station that night.
Hadfield’s discovery came as the number of calls slowed down so a couple of engine crews equipped with squeegees pushed the water out, Orr added.
Looking at a lineup of fans sitting in a hallway, Orr noted it didn’t represent even half of the drying machines set up in the station through the weekend along with a handful of massive dehumidifiers.
“There’s a lot of moisture in there,” Battalion Chief Mike Barneich noted a few days earlier.
Because the fire station is an essential services facility, it features stronger-than-normal construction material, making demolition more difficult, he noted wryly.
“Much easier to put it in than to take it out, isn’t it?” he asked a worker.
Until the station is livable, Station 1 firefighters are sleeping at Station 3 on Preisker Lane. Battalion chiefs are taking temporary shelter at night in Station 5 at Suey Road.
During the day, Station 1 firefighters are remaining in Station 1’s area to stay close to their likely calls, Orr said.
Orr met with engineers to devise a plan to avoid a reoccurrence, possibly by drilling holes to help encourage drainage off site during another heavy rainfall.
The current Station No. 1 was dedicated in 2002, to replace the longtime firehouse at the corner of Cook and McClelland streets.
“I worked out of the station for almost a decade and never had anything like that happen,” Barneich said.
This isn’t the first time firefighters have encountered an emergency at a Santa Maria fire station. In 1956, the city’s only station burned along with three of the four engines in an incident blamed on a spark that ignited gasoline.
— Noozhawk North County editor Janene Scully can be reached at jscully@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.
