Located near the corner of North Torrey Pines Road and Genesee Avenue, Fire Station 52 sits on property formerly used for tennis courts on the northwest edge of the UC San Diego campus.
The university was instrumental in the effort, giving land for the project and contributing $20.5 million, which Chancellor Pradeep Khosla called “an amazing collaboration.”
“When I first got here, this was on the docket,” said Khosla, who became chancellor in 2012. “It took a little while to figure out how would the UC bureaucracy work and how would we be able to carve out a piece of our property and give it to the city.”
Khosla said the result was “an amazing fire station” that will help improve response times on fire and medical calls at UC San Diego and to the surrounding Torrey Pines community.
Fire Chief Robert Logan said the station was first discussed back in 2010 by former Councilmember Sherri Lightner, then-Fire Chief Javier Mainar and former Chancellor Marye Anne Fox.
The state-of-the-art station is a rectangular 14,600-square-foot building with a black, red and white color scheme. It has three apparatus bays, an office, workout room and equipment locker room on the first floor, with a kitchen, sleeping quarters, a room equipped with a big-screen TV and a line of comfortable-looking chairs on the second floor.
It also is home to the city’s first electric fire engine, manufactured by Pierce Volterra and delivered just a day before the ribbon cutting. The engine cost $2.1 million and the city spent an additional $600,000 for a charging station and related infrastructure at the new fire station, Assistant Chief James Gaboury said.
The station “went live” last Tuesday with crews running calls for the past week and a half. But it will take several weeks for the new electric engine to be ready. For now, a reserve diesel engine is assigned to the station.
“We still have to do all the outfitting on it,” Gaboury said. “The equipment mounts need to be put on it” and staff will need to be trained on how to plug it in.
From the outside, the shiny red engine looks exactly like the rest of the department’s fleet. “The idea is to make sure all the pieces of equipment are the same,” Gaboury said. “All the hose, all the knobs, all the levers — everything else is exactly the same as the other 85 fire engines that we have.”
The only exception is an 18-inch box in the middle of the apparatus where the EV batteries are stored. It does sound different, though: Like all EVs, it is extremely quiet when driven.
Gaboury said the engine is equipped with a diesel engine, which will automatically kick on when the battery runs out, either when it is being driven or pumping water.
He said it isn’t really a hybrid, it just has a backup engine. “It is a seamless transition,” he said. “You don’t have any drop off in water pressure or anything. It is a very smooth transition.”
Fire officials opted for the diesel backup because the equipment needs to be reliable during extended fire events. The engine can go up to 80 miles on a battery charge and pump water for an average of two hours before the diesel kicks in, Gaboury said.
There are similar engines being beta-tested in Oregon, Arizona and Wisconsin, but San Diego is getting the first production model of the engine in the western U.S., according to Gaboury.
Mayor Todd Gloria said the long-awaited fire station shows that persistence pays off. He said he has the “absolute utmost respect” for first responders like firefighters and paramedics and said they deserve to work in nice facilities.
“These are not 9 to 5 jobs, everybody, this is 365, 24/7, and they deserve a first-class facility like this to make sure that as they are doing that difficult work and keeping us safe, they are able to do it in an environment that shows them the respect of our community,” the mayor said.
Gloria said the new fire station will lower the fire-rescue response times in “this thriving corner of America’s Finest City” and said purchasing an electric fire engine shows the city’s commitment to its climate action plan.
©2024 The San Diego Union-Tribune, Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
