Miami Beach does hurry-up hunt for new fire station site

A move to save the South Shore Community Center came to the Miami Beach City Commission last month as the city’s Fire Station No. 1 is due to be placed at the center site at 833 Sixth St.

Kristen Rosen Gonzalez, who brought the item, finally asked to defer it to Jan. 31, which passed 5-2. Her deferral left her a month to look for an alternate location for the fire station.

Conditions of the current fire station were cited as Commissioner David Suarez presented photos and shared a conversation with a firefighter in which he was told by the first responder that the firefighter was “coughing up muck” after his shift.

This conversation led to Commissioner Suarez making a motion for emergency funding “to request that the administration move forward with figuring out how we can have emergency funds to help prepare the fire station.” The motion passed 5-2.

In addition to the station’s condition, the location of the desired South Shore Community Center site was taken into account as residents in parts of the southeastern-most point of the city are outside of the optimum time of response for fire rescue services.

Commissioner Alex J. Fernandez expressed concerns as residents in different parts of the city such as in Palm and Hibiscus Islands, he said, “are outside the optimum time of service.… For example, when we’re saying the need for this facility is not for 14 firefighters, it is for our resident that had a cardiac difficulty on Dec. 4 at a residence on Hibiscus Drive, or the resident that was ill on Hibiscus Court on Sept. 1, or the person that had the accident with injury on Fountain Street on the MacArthur Causeway. These are all locations within our city that right now are not benefiting from the optimum service that they should be receiving.”

The Fire Station No. 1 project dates back to 2015. A resolution document says “the city administration commissioned a professional evaluation of Fire Station No. 1 by Borrelli and Partners, and the final report issued on May 6, 2015, indicated that existing site conditions and minimum code requirements warranted a full demolition and site reconstruction of Fire Station No. 1.”

Fire Chief Virgil Fernandez shared the project’s beginnings. He noticed almost 10 years ago that Fire Station No. 1, he said, “was falling apart. Since that day, we’ve been trying to keep it in pieces…. Initially, the request was: is there anything we can do to renovate the station? We started looking at the cost of renovating the station and what we did was hire a private consultant to come and take a look at the station and say how feasible is it to fix everything that’s wrong with the fire station, including the level at which the station was built.”

“A recommendation was made to rebuild the fire station,” he said. “I was told that Fire Station 1 was not going to be touched because it was a [Miami Beach architect] Morris Lapidus [design]. So we went on a journey to find where can we fit a fire station.”