After many years of planning, ceremonial shovels finally broke the ground July 5, to signify construction of a new, state-of-the-art fire station, emergency medical services (EMS), and coroners complex for Putnam County.
“This project is actually a decade in the making. It was being worked on by Chief Shane Hill, the chief before me,” said Putnam County Fire Chief Thomas McClain, who took the position over in March 2020. “Our current Fire Station 10 in town was built in the 1980s and it’s been added onto several times. It’s served us well, but we’ve just kind of outgrown it.” The new 27,000-squarefoot complex will feature six drive-through bays for fire and EMS vehicles in the more than 19,000-square-foot main building. It will also include 13 private bunk rooms for round-the clock staffing (as is the current practice), four bathrooms, each with a shower, plus a laundry room. Additionally, there will be several offices, a large, common living area and a classroom capable of handling up to 32 trainees at a time.
A separate, nearly 8,000-square-foot structure will rise nearby to house the county coroner’s needs.
According to Putnam County Manager Paul Van Haute, the new public safety complex will cost about $6 million to build, with approximately $4.1 million secured from the federal government’s American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), established during the original COVID-19 crisis.
“Unfortunately, fire and emergency response is a very expensive proposition in county government,” Van Haute said. “But at the end of the day, if the fire is at your house, you want the maximum amount of response from the county and that’s what we have to be ready for each and every day.
“So I’m just really appreciative of the community and the commissioners for their visionary leadership with respect to how much this county is growing and just how to position that next level of fire protection for the residents coming in,” he continued.
“We’re seeing development, normal development of 200, 300 new homes a year. And we have several large subdivisions on the horizon with as many as 600 homes planned in some of them. So the county is growing quite rapidly, and this is a big step to start protecting them with the level of service they would expect.”
McClain said the county is saving money by building on land it already owns behind its administrative offices at 117 Putnam Dr., and confirmed the location also offers good, quick access to major roads for large fire and EMS vehicles. The new location will maintain or even improve response time for most destinations within the county, he said.
“We’ve located in such a way that fire or EMS apparatus can respond out of the station into a less busy road and then access the (Hwy.) 441 bypass at a red light, which is a controlled intersection to flow into traffic. And from there they can easily go north, they can go south, or they can go straight into town, so they can access every direction of the county,” McClain explained.
Both Van Haute and McClain stressed this is not an additional fire station for Putnam County, but rather a replacement for the aging Station 10 currently situated in downtown Eatonton.
“We’re only moving a couple of miles from where the current Station 10 is, so being in the center of the county these trucks back up a lot of the other coverage areas from there. So it’s really not going to make a drastic difference in the service coverage that we currently have,” the chief said. “Mostly it’s just going to provide better living conditions for our employees and better access for the equipment to respond.”
After considering “six or seven” bids for the construction contract, McClain said Renfroe Construction in Macon was selected to build the new public safety complex. He said the project is expected to take about nine months to complete.
“The county’s growing and the fire department’s growing with it,” McClain said. “We hope to be able to better serve the community in several aspects with this new building. And our plan is for the building to meet our needs for many years to come.”