BENTONVILLE — Eighteen months ago, the Bentonville Fire Department closed its central fire station located at 215 S.W “A” St., replacing it with a state-of-the-art facility just down the road. Now a year and half later, Bentonville continues to see the benefit of the new Fire Station No. 1 every day.
“Really the first thing we can say is it has given us more room, just more elbow room,” Fire Chief Dan White said. “The station runs quite a bit through there and I know they like having the extra space.”
Opened in June 2008, the station appeared to have come at just the right time. With the former central station — constructed in 1962 — running short on room, the city made sure space wouldn’t be an issue when impact-fee money and other city funds were used to build a new Station No. 1 just six blocks away at 800 S.W. “A” St.
From training space to meeting areas all the way down to the much-needed larger sleeping quarters, the station gives the department ample room to not only serve the city, but to prepare its firefighters in a better way.
“Some of the features that are tied into the building have helped,” White said. “The training room is a big addition. We have 2,000 square feet of training space and we can split that into two and hold more than one training session at a time. That has allowed us to do a lot of our training at the station and one of the things we were hoping to do when we built the station was to have national level training classes from our Fire Academy. We’ve also held NIMS training at the station, which is National Incident Management System training.”
The new station also gave the city its first five-level training tower, allowing all of the department’s training to finally be held in one space.
Kevin Monroe is the fire chief at the nearby Highway 94 East Volunteer Fire Department. Also a vice president of the Benton County Fire Association, Monroe said having a training area inside a station is invaluable to a department.
“I’ve been in the Bentonville No. 1 station many times and it is very impressive,” Monroe said. “I know from the public view somebody might say that’s too much money to spend on a building like that. But if you look at what firefighters used to deal with, training in schools and gyms and wherever else they could find, it’s worth it to be able to train right there under one roof. And if you have the resources to build something like that, you should definitely build it.”
Although the station has helped to improve training, White said it hasn’t produced a major change in response times in the area. But White also pointed out when the station was built, the department didn’t anticipate response times would necessarily be affected.
“We’re just a few blocks away from where the old station was, so there’s not much difference,” White said. “But being so close to the Wal-Mart offices, we do a number of runs to that area. Anytime you have that many people in one area, you’re going to have a lot of calls. So obviously our response times to there have been improved.”
Named the Gold Medal winner for career fire stations by Fire Chief magazine in 2008 — given in honor of the station’s design and style — Fire Station No. 1 is also more than just an increase in space for the firefighters. With a lobby museum and tours available, the station is also a building that offers a history of the Bentonville Fire Department.
“That’s the fun thing about this station,” White said. “We’ve had a lot of people come through and tour this facility and they are blown away with what their town has in a fire station.”
Even with the addition of the new Fire Station No. 1, though, White said the department still has room to grow. Currently, Bentonville has three different properties purchased for future stations, which would raise the total in the city from five stations to eight. Those properties are located at Southwest “I” Street and Arkansas 12, west of the Wal-Mart Distribution Center on Arkansas 12 and near the Bentonville Industrial Development area.
White said there is no set date on building the new stations.
“We don’t know right now when those stations will be built, but I think everyone recognizes a need, particularly for station No. 6,” White said. “But there’s not a definite timetable on when that will happen. It all depends on the economy and the resources that we have.”