By Lee Ross
Mountain View Telegraph
EDGEWOOD, N.M — It’s been a long time coming, but a new fire station should be up and running in Edgewood by 2013.
The county held a groundbreaking ceremony for the new fire station on Thursday. The station will be on Section 16, just south of Edgewood Middle School and west of N.M. 344.
The new station will be about 15,000 square feet and it should be completed by the end of July in 2013, according to County Manager Kathrine Miller. After the dust settles, it will cost about $2.9 million, she said. Miller added that Santa Fe County Commissioner Robert Anaya should take some credit for keeping after the project.
“You run into a lot of barriers to make something happen,” she said.
According to Edgewood Volunteer Fire Department Chief Ray Mahalick, the current station is pretty cozy.
He said four firefighters sleep in one room now.
The new station is another in a string of improvements, according to former Edgewood Mayor Howard Calkins, who was one of the town’s first volunteer firefighters, he said.
“I’m glad to see this,” he said. "... Our tools were a bucket of water, a burlap bag and a shovel.”
According to Santa Fe County Fire Chief David Sperling, the local fire department started in 1964 with 10 volunteers. In addition to the tools Calkins described, he said they had a few rakes. A few years after it got started, the department got a fire engine and bought an old truck that twas into a water tanker, he said. There was no ambulance until 1980, he said.
The station now has quite a bit more equipment, a full-time staff and three ambulances. The department supports several fire departments in the Estancia Valley and responds to about 1,000 calls per year, he said. Sperling said he is excited to come back when the building is up and running. “We look forward to doing this again in about 10 months,” he said.
Copyright 2012 Albuquerque Journal