For the second time in three weeks, Flagler County Fire Rescue marked a fire station groundbreaking Monday, for Station 51, at the intersection of County Road 305 and State Road 100. The station will replace the current Station 51 in isolated Espanola.
Three weeks ago, the department broke ground on a $13 million, 19,500-square-foot administration building and Station 50 in Bunnell, paid for with a $10 million legislative appropriation and $3 million in local dollars, primarily from the half-cent sales tax.
This morning, the ceremony was for an $8.7 million, 10,000-square-foot building next to the big red barn that’s become home to the county’s roads and bridges division. The station was initially planned as a $4 million facility. That was before Covid, inflation and tariffs. It should open in a year.
“When you look at our heat maps,” Flagler County Fire Chief Michael Tucker said, “it’s happening out here. It’s not really happening in Espanola. So having this station, and keeping station 57 which is St Johns Park, actually strategically locates crews closer to the call volume that’s happening now. We want to improve response times to this side of the county.”
The areas that will benefit most are Daytona North, also known as the Mondex, and the west side of the county to the Putnam County line. About 80 percent of the calls are medical.
“I’m very happy that they’re going to have additional services out here,” County Commission Chair Leann Pennington, who represents the west side, said. “It will help the response times. When I first came on, a lot of people talked to me about taking 30 minutes or more sometimes to get an ambulance to their house.” Pennington was elected three years ago. “And so with this and 2006 running together, they should have much more expedited services out here. That’s what they need.” Station 57 at St. Johns Park is sometimes referred to as 2006 because it fronts County Road 2006.
The old Station 51 sits on 0.68 acres, or 29,770 square feet, in the center of Espanola, with a building and land valued at a mere $137,600. The property appraiser lists the building’s size at 3,318 square feet. The chief put the living spaces at closer to 1,400 to 1,500 square feet.
Clay Merritt, who just retired from Flagler County Fire Rescue as a lieutenant and who had been attached to Station 51, recalls it starting as a volunteer station before it shifted to professional firefighters. He remembers those days and nights well. “Crews in the station slept in office cubicles, there was little privacy, and you could also hear everybody snoring,” Merritt said. “The station was completely remodeled in 2015 which created bunk rooms and additional storage space. For those working in the station we now have a firehouse, not cobbled together.”
Each shift has two crew members. Station 51 has a fire engine, an attack or woods truck, a tender truck and an ambulance. The same equipment will be moved to the new station. A lot of that apparatus has been parked outside in Espanola. It’ll be indoors at the new station, protecting and prolonging the life of the equipment. So while the new station sounds a lot bigger, Tucker said, much of that space will be for the equipment to protect it from the Florida sun.
“As this area continues to grow, the station is designed so that we can add staff, which will happen eventually, but not right away,” the chief said.
Fire stations are designed for 50 years. County commissioners, Tucker said, have committed to modernizing them. “We’re past that point with some of our facilities, and they’re not in good condition,” he said, “so this obviously represents their commitment to public safety for the individuals of the county, it represents the safety of the firefighters for health and welfare, because the stations were designed to minimize their exposure to carcinogens from the bunker gear that they wear into fires and things like that. So the commissioners are supporting us. We really appreciate that, which in turn allows them to be more effective in supporting the citizens.”
The county operates 13 fire stations, five of them co-located with municipal fire stations in Palm Coast and Flagler Beach. The county has nine front-line ambulances at those fire stations, four held in reserve.
County officials have not yet decided what to do with the old fire station. In the coming years, the county intends to break ground on a new fire station in Korona–a volunteer fire station south of the U.S. 1 roundabout–and a new one at Cody’s Corner, at the southwest end of the county, along State Road 11.
“A lot of the previous fire stations were built around volunteers, so it doesn’t have adequate living spaces,” County Administrator Heidi Petito said at the groundbreaking, which also drew Palm Coast Fire Chief Kyle Berryhill and Flagler Beach Fire Chief Stephen Cox, both of whom had been at the previous fire station groundbreaking three weeks ago. Bunnell Police Chief Dave Brannon represented his city. Their presence reflects the “mutual aid” culture that prevails among the fire services locally. This time, Percy Sayles was fully in civilian clothes as the former deputy fire chief has assumed the deputy county administrator role.
The county is also continuing to explore whether to return FireFlight, the emergency helicopter, into a 24-hour operation, as it once was until almost 20 years ago.
“We’re keeping an eye on that. We’ll be ready to do it when it’s needed, but we’re just not quite there yet,” Tucker said. The county commissioned its new FireFlight, a $5.6 million machine, in August 2024. FireFlight is regularly used to assist the Flagler County Sheriff in policing operations. Tucker said that happens about 10 times a month, sometimes less. “We’ve invested a lot of equipment, time and resources into that new helicopter, the camera system, to be able to support him in his operation,” Tucker said of the sheriff. “So we’re going to continue to do that.”
The physical address of the new station is to be 245 County Road 305.
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