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.
Joe D says
Great decision to add TIMELY emergency coverage to the WESTERN Areas of Flagler County. As a retired Nursing Supervisor and Certified Nurse Case Manager…a 30 minute emergency (fire or medical) response time is UNACCEPTABLE. Nothing over 10-15 minutes maximum ( unless there are multiple calls at the same time). It’s an exceptionally dense area but with large forested areas, and a multitude of older manufactured homes, which have only basic resistance to fires spreading to surrounding structures.
Moving from an area that had 24/7 emergency helicopter transport services, it makes me NERVOUS to only have limited Flight service hours available for helicopter medical transport. I’m wondering if those 10 helicopter trips per month would be more needed if the service had more nighttime and weekend hours of availability. Do we have ANY DATA, on which emergency ground service (ambulance) transports SHOULD have been FLIGHT TRANSPORTS , IF, the helicopter flight services were available? My prior pre-retirement home area was the original SHOCK/TRAUMA treatment system in the country. The goal was to be able to transport major TRAUMA cases to a major trauma center within 1 (“golden”) hour of the incident first call. It was the BLUE PRINT for the development of Trauma systems across the country.
Safety unfortunately isn’t cheap, but I’d rather see more Safety concerns paid for by tax dollars than a new SPORTS COMPLEX or additional PICKLE BALL COURTS.
And BEFORE anyone tosses in “excessive spending” on BEACH Renourishment, I want Flagler County taxpayers to remember, that the BEACH area CONTRIBUTES $900 million tax dollars to the Flagler County tax base EACH YEAR…
JimboXYZ says
“The station was initially planned as a $4 million facility. That was before Covid, inflation and tariffs.”
What no mention of Bidenomics ? What a bunch of BS. Still using Covid as an excuse to overcharging & gouging for resources of materials & labor that just aren’t scarce ? We all know when the inflation economy was ushered in for unaffordable. Biden-Harris inflation, tariffs era Trump haven’t even begun to approach the worst of Bidenomics inflation. That replacement fire station at the original cost projection was never a $ 4 million dollar facility.
Despite the improved response time ? Increased traffic will increase that response time. Adding an ambulance there, if hey didn’t have one originally, only saves the time that the ambulance is now closer to a 911 call. And when the speed limits are slower, more traffic ? What a bunch of nonsense. If it was taking 30 minutes for an ambulance to arrive ? I’d say there was no real sense of urgency to respond ? Most of the FD calls are for traffic accidents, not fires. I know, I listen to the Flagler County FD radio band frequency for dispatches. Why isn’t Advent & the rest of the unaffordable healthcare system providing ambulatory ? Look at these report(s) for statistics.
https://www.flaglercounty.gov/County-Services/Public-Safety/Flagler-County-Fire-Rescue/Flagler-County-Fire-Rescue-Annual-Reports
Ray W. says
Hello JimboXYZ.
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to point out your partial lie. Yes, there was Bidenomics. And, yes, there was Trumpenomics. Both presidents did the same thing in response to the economic damage caused by the pandemic. President Trump signed into law two unfunded stimulus packages passed by Congress totaling $2.9 trillion. Much of that money was immediately spent with the intent to heat up a rapidly cooling economy, but Congress intended that some of that money was to be parceled out over time. Once former President Biden beat Trump in 2020, Congress passed two more unfunded stimulus packages, totaling $3 trillion. Again, much of that money was immediately spent with the intent to continue heating up the economy, but Congress intended that some of the money was to be parceled out over time. At around the same time, the Fed lowered the lending rate to zero and released into the credit marketplace an additional $3 trillion for lenders to loan at rates that became as low as 2.7%.
These three different approaches contributed to the inflation we all experienced then and still experience now.
Again, JimboXYZ, thank you for allowing me yet another opportunity to point out to all FlaglerLive readers that you are the intentional partial lie launderer that you have willingly allowed yourself to become. Trump had a hand in instigating the inflation we still feel. Biden, too. In a different way, so did Fed Chair Powell. No one can throw trillions of unfunded stimulus dollars into an economy and expect that nothing will happen.