We previously told you about the City of Henderson's plans to relocate Fire Station 81 to the former Camping World building off Boulder Highway. The goal was to reduce response times. Now that it's been open for about five months at the new location, I'm following up to find out if that strategy is actually working.
Henderson Fire Chief Scott Vivier tells me the numbers so far are encouraging. He said for the first five months at the new location, the response time for 90% of their calls was 11 seconds faster compared to that same time period last year at the old location.
Watch | Anjali Patel follows up with Henderson's fire chief to find out if this relocation plan was a success:
"I know you hear 11 seconds, and you think, 'Wow, is that really a difference?' But in trying to reduce response times, a change of 1 second or greater takes a tremendous amount of work and addition of resources," Vivier said. "When we saw that we were 11 seconds faster 90% of the time, that is a huge improvement, and that makes a major difference to our ability to reach our citizens and provide good care to them."
At the old station at College Drive and Horizon Drive, he said they had difficulty getting close to the baseline response time they try to meet.
"The previous station was an old station that was built long before Henderson had grown up. As the city built up around it, that corner became very congested and busy. It's a very popular corner, so the first challenge that crews had to face was just getting into and out of the station. The second one was, it's a small building. So as we have grown in the fire service, the building no longer could fit the apparatus that we utilize or the number of people," Vivier said. He also said it wasn't designed to modern standards and didn't take into account the privacy considerations for the men and women who work there.
At the new station, he said they're much closer — only about five seconds off — from where they want to be in terms of the baseline response time. He said it's well situated, off Boulder Highway and close to U.S. 95/I-11, so they can better serve the more than 38,000 residents who live in this fire district in the growing southeastern part of the City of Henderson.
"This building also offered us the advantages of having three long apparatus bays and a built-in warehouse — all things the fire department was needing at the time," he said.
He added that relocating the station to the former RV dealership was more cost-effective than building a new station from scratch.
"The reuse of this building saved the city millions of dollars and several months of construction time, because we already had a perfectly good shell that all we had to do was change the insides," he said.
He said the relocation of the station came about in a surprising way.
"We had a crew that was here training when the building was closed, and they sent a video to our logistics chief at the time and said, 'Wouldn't this be a great location for a training center?' he said.
He said they did some analysis and determined it was an ideal space for a fire station. The stars just aligned, he said.
"Currently, we don't have any other stations planned to be constructed, not for at least the next five to 10 years, and so our focus will be adding resources to our existing stations," Vivier said. He said Station 81 has room to grow and can sleep an additional seven people.
I asked him how that growth would be possible, when Henderson voters rejected a ballot question last year that sought to levy an additional property tax of 6 cents per $100 of assessed valuation to improve public safety by reducing fire and EMS response times. About 61% of voters said "no" to that initiative.
"That would've been a very special thing for us. We've never had an added revenue source. So the fire department has always learned how to grow within the current city budget, so it just causes us to be more strategic," he said.