Proposed four-bay redesign for Fire Station 8 at its current location. Photo Contributed
Marguerite Reed Gooden could not conceal her delight at the comments of County Board Member Christian Dorsey during the County Board vote on 19 June. Dorsey said he was voting to keep the Fire Station 8 where it is, rebuilding on the site, rather than relocating the fire station further north.
The Board voted 4-1 to keep the Fire Station 8 on Lee Highway where it has served Arlingtonians for almost 100 years. Board Chairman Libby Garvey started off the voting by making a motion to move the fire house to Old Dominion and 26th Street. The move would put Fire Station 8 closer to underserved Arlington residents in north Arlington. She acknowledged she did not think she would get any support for the motion, but she believed it all came down to adding seconds to the response time for areas of Arlington which have insufficient response, and she believed the County Manager's interest in helping as many people as possible was valid.
“Far and away the most important criteria is getting as many people as possible that can be reached as quickly as possible,” said Garvey. “It doesn’t seem like a lot, but if you’re waiting for help in a life or death situation, which I have done, desperately waiting for someone to come save the person you love: every second counts. Every second is an eternity.”
But for most on the County Board, the priority for response times centered around areas of greatest need rather than providing the greatest coverage. But for most on the County Board, the priority for response times centered around areas of greatest need rather than providing the greatest coverage.
“Response times are attractive because they have the appearance of determinative data, but they are not,” said Dorsey. “One thing that concerns me greatly [with the] consideration of moving the fire station north [is that it] moves resources further away from the number of people who may be requiring services… Most of the emergencies that fire and rescue are called to are EMS, which take place in points at, south, and near the current Fire Station 8. While moving it north clearly expands the number of residents that fit within that coverage map, it moves it further away from where you have the largest concentration of people and the activity those people perform and where we expect the largest numbers of people to be in the future.”
Katie Cristol voted to keep the station where it is Cristol said cost mattered…. but response time has to be the deciding factor. She noted that using the 4-6 minute response time as a window was not necessarily the right goal: and a 6-minute travel time is not good enough. Performance measures, Cristol said, should be under 6 minutes, and the issue for her was not to get as many people as possible into a 6-minute window but to get as many as possible to a 0-4 minute window.
John Vihstadt, in his vote for keeping the station on Lee Highway, noted the development taking place in the Ballston corridor and increasing demand there and around Virginia Hospital Center as chief factors in the decision. Vihstadt also stressed the County Manager and fire chief’s mandate that they would try to reduce response times for every fire station across the county.
Jay Fisette said he had been told when he entered county government that the only thing harder than placing a fire station in an area was removing one from an area. Once it was determined the site on Lee Highway could support a four-bay station, thanks to the the task force asking the question, the decision was easy.
In discussion after the vote, residents hugged and praised the process: this had been a major victory, they said, for the “Arlington Way” — community involvement and advocacy. “This will be important,” said Gooden, “as we move forward with Lee Highway corridor development.”
— Vernon Miles contributed to this story