After forty years, the Tumbler Ridge Fire Department has outgrown the Tumbler Ridge Fire Hall.
Actually, that happened a number of years back, and the issue of retooling the Fire Hall has been on (and off) the budget since 2007.
The building is now nearly 20 years older since then, and eyes are turning towards replacing, rather than renovating.
In 2024, administration completed a feasibility study to determine future plans for the fire hall, enlisting Faction Architecture out of Grande Prairie to prepare a feasibility report.
That report recommends replacement of the building, and provides costing estimates, conceptual drawings and possible locations for Council’s consideration.
The new facility would serve as an Emergency Operations Centre (EOC) in the case of emergencies (in the past, Town Hall has served this purpose), and would also have space for Tumbler Ridge Search and Rescue (TRSAR).
(Currenty, the District has to lease additional space in the Commercial Park to store its Wildland Fire Truck, which TRSAR is currently sharing. If the District no longer needed the space, it would negatively impact TRSAR.)
Of course, that is just a proposal, and TRSAR has not agreed to be in the proposed space. However the additional space could also be leased to another emergency service such as BC Emergency Health Services for their BC Ambulance operations.
In 2022, administration undertook a feasibility study to replace the fire hall, with Johnson Davidson Architecture being awarded the project in late 2022. The project was delayed due to wildfires, and, while the proposal met the needs of the department, the cost estimates were “significantly higher than expected based on other comparable fire halls of similar size and construction.”
Faction Architecture, who had also bid on the project, were asked to complete their own feasibility study with no knowledge of the original proponents report details. “Ultimately,” writes Fire Chief Dustin Curry in a report to Council, “the cost estimates provided by Faction Architecture proved to be much more aligned with expectations.”
That cost estimate? $11,750,000.
The current building has 540 m2 of space, about half of that for the fire trucks.
A new fire hall would more than double that size on the ground floor, and add a second floor that would weigh in at 453 m2. (The current fire hall does have a fire tower, weighing in at about 15 m2.)
The new building would, according to the report, expand space for apparatus from three to eight, one of which could serve as a wash bay. It would offer more space for the firefighters, from a bigger fitness area to space for personal lockers. A new training room would double as the EOC when required, with a separate public entrance that could be locked off from the rest of the fire hall.
And finally, the new building would be built with the BC Building Code and the National Building Code of Canada in mind. Fire halls are considered “post disaster structures”. These are buildings “that are essential to the provision of services in the event of a disaster. Therefore, the building is to be designed to a higher level of performance in the event of an extreme climatic event or other disasters so that operational functionality with little or no damage can be maintained after an event,” says the report.
A trio of potential locations are all within a block and a half of the current fire hall, and include on Pioneer Loop, near the bike pump track, on Isles Way across from the Chevron, or across the street from that location, by the parking lot.
But why, asks the mayor, do we need a new facility? And why didn’t council see the report from the first group?
Fire Chief Curry says that both firms asked for a feasibility study very quickly realized the cost benefit trade off between just doing renovations was “vastly outweighed” by the potential of building a new one. “When we’re talking about the things that are contained in this report such as adding another bay on, or adding a second floor onto the existing building because we don’t have shower facilities or when we talk about having a leaking roof. There’s a lot of things that has already been presented to council on why this needs to be done. The way that we do things now is vastly different from how we do things in 1982 when this hall was built.”
And the reason why the first report was not shown to council, was that the proposed costs were more than double the second report, at $24.6 million. “We didn’t have faith in the data that we were getting from that company. They were very experienced. They had great references, but for one reason or another it was at the time where costs were high for building. And to be truthful I don’t think they had a grasp of what we were looking for and what our community is.”
While the proposal shown to council is less than half the original proposal, it is still a big pill for council to swallow. “I definitely have some sticker shock,” says Councillor Norbury. “What we have now isn’t what we need. It’s not good enough. It’s not functional. I fully support that. I get it. But how are we going to pay for this? Are there any grants on the horizon we could put towards this? Is this going to be purely from savings and taxation?”
Curry says grants are few and far between. “We may be looking at something similar to what we did with the Community Centre, where we go through a long-term borrowing scenario, where we pay for this over the next 30 years. That doesn’t preclude us from actively searching for grants. The Mackenzie fire hall was 95 percent paid for by grants so we know that they’re out there. It’s just trying to find where to apply for them. How are we going to get that funding and move forward in the best financially responsible way? This is not a full time fire hall. This is not the Ferrari of fire halls this is a very scaled down version of what fire departments are in 2025. There are no sleeping quarters in this. There is a shower facility on the main floor, which is required. There is a relaxation area on the second floor with a gym. Right now we have a storage room that’s converted into a gym. This is more just capturing what we need. There’s not a lot of nice-to-haves over need-to-haves in this in this building.”
Councillor Norbury asks if there’s any room to cut down. “I see a training room. I see a secondary lounge. There’s a fitness centre, but we already have a fitness centre that all members get access to. We have four bays and this would take us to eight. Is there any options for potential cost savings?”
First off, says Curry, there’s always going to be wiggle room. “Currently we have three bays. We rent a fourth one for the smallest of the trucks on an annual basis. So we are going to be able to save that cost on a yearly basis. We also have two additional bays on this proposed building, which are for search and rescue, understanding that, should this building be built, we are going to be taking our wildland vehicle away from the space they occupy. That’s the intent, but we could offer the space to BC Ambulance. But an easy way to save costs is to cut those last two bays right out of it and we’d be fine. But if we rent it out, now it’s revenue generating. There’s a lot of forethought that came into this building about how to not just use it as a fire hall, but to use it for Emergency Management when it’s needed. During the evacuation, we converted our training room into a sleeping area for firefighters. We could do that with the training room here, but now they have an access to shower facility and a kitchen area where they can actually get some downtime and a good meal. I know that’s planning for the eventuality but that’s what we need to be doing at this point. It is not just looking at what we need now, but looking at what might we need in the future and balancing that with the ‘pipe dream fire hall’.
Norbury says at this moment, it looks like moving ahead with the fire hall would be purely tax funded. “We need to be having these discussions about how can we scale this down.”
He says if it were 95 percent funded like Mackenzie’s he’s in. “But realistically, at this point in time we need to look at what is the need right now.”
Mayor Krakowka says there’s been some discussion around some of the other buildings in Tumbler Ridge, like the RCMP station.
Curry says the topic of a tri-service building has been floated in the past, but there’s a lot of issues. “Trying to deal with multiple levels of government in order to try and come to a common goal is tricky,” he says. “The building for the RCMP is actually federally owned, so we can’t do anything when it comes to it’s a federal Crown building. He says the last time the idea of putting all three Emergency Services under the same roof was back in the mid-2000s. “The price tag for that building was more than what you’re seeing right now in this report, and that was twenty years ago. You can use your imagination to see what the cost would be for such a building today.”
He says he had a conversation with BC Ambulance. They are also looking at upgrading their space, but that’s been underway for years. “There is a higher likelihood that they would want to move into the fire hall now versus spending the money to sign a long-term lease.”
Curry says there are other communities—like Creston—where BC Ambulance is part of the fire hall, but that was built before they had their new model. “They had to do some reconfiguring in order to put sleeping quarters for their ambulance attendants to be able to use the hall in its current fashion.”
The mayor asks if they’ve looked at “a basic fire hall, something like Beaverlodge’s new fire hall.”
Curry says they have looked at a lot of options. “There is nothing fancy about the fire hall that was built in Beaverlodge. It is very industrial looking. Something like that would fly in the face of our downtown design guidelines. And when the first thing that people see in our downtown core, do we want a fire hall that looks like a commercial building?”
He says the Beaverlodge Fire Hall was about three million dollars, if he remembers correctly. “There’s a considerable price difference, but there’s an aesthetic component to that.”
Much of council had difficulty with the price tag. Councillor Gulick says that $12 million is a lot of money. “Even across 40 or 50 years, it’s a lot of money,” she says. “But I still think though that it’s important that we have these buildings. We need them. The first person whose house burns down because we don’t have a proper facility? We’re going to have some upset folks. I was scared during the evacuation. This building gets us ready for things like that.
“And this is at the heart of it: nobody needs the fire department until they need the fire department and when they need the fire department they really really want the fire department. I think it’s important that we look past the price tag.
“I would disagree about the look of the building. I think there’s more than just looking at a building. I agree that we talk about design. We talk about the type of community that we live in and I think it’s important to make sure that we keep with those design guidelines. I was all up in arms about the hospital in Grand Prairie once. I asked why would they make it all those curves? It makes more sense if it’s square boxes all that type of thing. And I had a student tell me that they were building a place for people to live. Do you really want to live someplace where everything’s just a box? I also believe that part of Recruitment and Retention of staff is being proud of where you work. Working in a place that’s easy to work in—where you’re not worrying about whether the toilet’s going to flush or if the roof’s going to leak…all of those things?”
She says she hears the concern of the rest of council. However, she says that if council wants certain requirements to be met, they need to spell it out to staff. “I don’t think we need to spend another $30,000 until we are clear to staff about what it is we’re looking at. We’ve got a few people that aren’t comfortable with the amount. Then what are you going to be comfortable with? If we send it out again and it comes back at another $12 million we’re another year down the road and now we’re getting less because costs have gone up.”
Ultimately, the report was provided for information and for discussion. Council is entering into budget discussions this week. More on this over the next few months.
Trent is the publisher of Tumbler RidgeLines.
