Assuming that construction goes as anticipated, the new Summit Fire & EMS  Station 10 in Silverthorne should be completed late in 2024 or early 2025. We aspire to under-promise and over-deliver on these timelines.

Summit Fire & EMS owns a site between the Town of Silverthorne’s maintenance facility and the Blue River Wastewater Treatment Plant, across Colorado 9 from the north entrance to Three Peaks.

After considering several different designs seeking to establish a facility as quickly as possible but also one that can be expanded easily (without a lot of tearing down and rebuilding) and one that, when built out will serve our purposes for 25+ years -- all while working within budget constraints and using tax dollars wisely -- the SF&EMS Board of Directors at the Nov. 15, 2022 meeting has selected this design, which is subject to change as the architects and engineers get to work:

Currently, when we anticipate heavy traffic congestion due to bad weather, interstate closures, special events, road construction or other factors, SFE can pre-position an ambulance or fire engine on the north side of Interstate 70. Additionally, we rely upon the assistance of the Colorado State Patrol, the Silverthorne and Dillon police and the Colorado Department of Transportation to assist with clearing a path for emergency apparatus through traffic. While there is no doubt that traffic congestion through the I-70/Blue River Parkway interchange is increasingly troublesome, our average call-response times to emergencies in Silverthorne remain well within industry standards. We know that in emergencies such as strokes or cardiac arrests, every minute counts, and we always are seeking ways to improve our responses times to all emergencies.

Every five years, the Insurance Services Offices, a national trade group, conducts evaluations of communities for fire safety – looking at resources such as water supplies and hydrants, proximity to fire stations, staffing and numbers of engines and fire trucks – and establishes risk ratings. Insurance companies often use these ratings to help determine policy prices. One of the key components in Summit County is whether a property is within a five-mile radius of a fire station. Because SF&EMS stored a reserve fire engine at the old, former Silverthorne fire station at 401 Blue River Parkway – even though since 2003 it had been used exclusively as an administration building, not a response station – it met the ISO standard as an “available resource” and extended our five-mile coverage north. When we vacated that building in 2019, we were allowed to lease a bay to continue keeping that engine there. But earlier this summer, when the town opened the art center, the lease ended. That meant that many properties at the north end of Silverthorne that had been within a five-mile radius of the Silverthorne facility no longer were within a five-mile radius of the next-closest response station, in Dillon. Essentially everything north of Three Peaks, including Summit Sky Ranch, no longer are within five miles of a fire station, and, as a result, the ISO rating went up for those areas. One short-term priority for SF&EMS has been to find at least a temporary home for a fire engine in Silverthorne, and, despite our best efforts to procure an enclosed, heated bay from both public and private organizations, we have not been able to do so.

More precisely, the ISO ratings are aligned with actual road miles. This image shows the approximate limits of the five-mile radius from the fire station in Dillon, with the outer edge at:

• Colorado 9 and Sage Creek Canyon Drive,
• 2115 Golden Eagle, above the Raven Golf Course
• 1575 Golden Eagle, north of Two Cabins
• Hamilton Creek Trail and Hamilton Creek Road
• Bald Eagle Road and Stonefly Drive in Angler Mountain Ranch

To determine your actual road distance, conduct an internet search of the distance from the Summit Fire & EMS station at 225 Lake Dillon Drive in Dillon to your address. If you are within five miles, you will be an ISO classification of 2. If you are within seven miles and have a fire hydrant within 1,000 feet of your occupancy, you will have an ISO classification of 10W.

Here is the letter ISO sent to the SF&EMS Fire Protection District Board of Directors summarizing the findings:

Here is the latest report from ISO on the Summit Fire & EMS Fire Protection District:

And here is a layman's description of the basic classification findings:  

Absolutely not. In fact, according to local insurance agents, the biggest factors affecting rising insurance rates in Summit County are increases in home values, inflation – which impacts home values, construction costs and, of course, insurance-company overhead – and losses from major events like wildfires throughout the state. Some insurance companies don’t even consider the ISO ratings, while others include it among a variety of factors that determine how much risk they’re willing to accept while remaining profitable. When a carrier experiences a year with higher than expected claims, it has to adjust premiums to cover losses and operating costs. Additionally, if you have filed a claim in recent years – burst water pipes are particularly common here – your rates likely will have gone up noticeably.

UPDATE APRIL 12, 2023: Summit Fire & EMS backed a reserve engine into a snug unit at Buffalo Mountain Storage this afternoon, creating a bit of temporary property-insurance relief for some resident at the north end of Silverthorne. Ever since we vacated our old administration building at Blue River Parkway and Fourth Street last year, SFE has not had a presence in town, and some insurance companies charge more for some residences if they are not within a five-mile radius of where the closest engine is staged. This should re-extend that five-mile radius and tide us over until we get our new fire station built at the north end of Silverthorne. If your rates were affected by this, it might be worth calling your agent. (To be certain, insurance rates have gone up everywhere, and for lots of other reasons, too.) Kudos to the management at Buffalo Mountain Storage for blowing in insulation and installing heaters and an electrical outlet to meet our needs. One of fire-medics has dubbed this unit "Station 9-1/2," because it's not quite Station 10, the designation for our once-and-future Silverthorne station.

UPDATE JAN. 17, 2023: We will be signing a contract with Buffalo Mountain Storage to rent a new unit meant for RV storage for staging a backup fire engine in Silverthorne. The company is in the process of installing insulation and a sufficient heating system in the unit, and then we will move in. Please note that this will not be a staffed engine with an assigned emergency-response crew but is intended solely to improve the ISO ratings of some properties by extending our five-mile radius to points north of Silverthorne, including Summit Sky Ranch, with an additional "available resource."

ORIGINAL POST:

We have been unsuccessful to date in finding space in an existing facility to store a fire engine and push that ISO five-mile boundary further north. We’ve reached out to private organizations such as Murdoch’s and Xcel Energy to see if any of them had space available, and no one has been able to assist us. While we are continuing to search – recently we have had conversations with management at Buffalo Mountain Storage about the new units being built for recreational vehicles, although one would require some retrofitting to keep it heated – we also are exploring options such as erecting a sprung-steel tent structure or other relatively inexpensive, temporary structure on the site of our future fire station at the north end of town.

In 2017, Summit County approached us about teaming with what then was the Summit County Ambulance Service and building a joint administration building in the County Commons complex near Frisco. The county offered the land for free, and the potential for increased efficiency for both organizations was too good to pass up. We moved into our new administration building in 2019, and, coincidentally, also consolidated with Summit County Ambulance under the interim Summit Fire & EMS Authority. To pay for Summit Fire’s share of the new building, however, we agreed to sell our old administration building in Silverthorne – which had not been used as a response station for 15 years – to the Town of Silverthorne, which used it as a headquarters for much of the new construction of the Fourth Street Crossing development.

Summit Fire & EMS set aside $450,000 in capital reserves in 2023 toward the design, engineering and initial construction work on the new Silverthorne fire station. Another $8.5 million is set to be allocated to the capital budget in 2024 for final construction expenses. This number may still fluctuate based on total building costs, including design/engineering, materials and construction. Fully built out, the facility is projected to cost $8.5 million to $10 million. SF&EMS has been searching for federal and state grants which may be available for facility construction. Importantly, a fully staffed, 24-hour response station with up to a four-person engine crew and a two-person ambulance crew costs the district about $3 million annually in salaries, building maintenance and supplies. Summit Fire and its predecessors always have taken pride in being debt-free so that our taxpayers are not burdened with the costs of interest on loans, and we traditionally have paid cash for new engines and other major capital expenses, including the construction of our new administration building. 

Interestingly, Summit Fire & EMS is an amalgamation of numerous smaller fire departments that have been absorbed through consolidation over the years. As recently as the 1990s, there were separate departments in Dillon, Dillon Valley, Frisco, Copper Mountain, Keystone, Montezuma and Silverthorne. Those separate organizations each built their own fire stations in conjunction with the municipalities they served. In those earlier days, each community had established its own fire district and built its own stations. Those departments all relied on volunteer firefighters who may or may not have been available at the time that an emergency response was needed. Through efficiencies gained by consolidation and a steady transition to a fully professional, 24-hour all-hazards emergency-response organization, Summit Fire and its predecessor organizations such as Lake Dillon Fire-Rescue and the Snake River Fire Department, have been able to compress into four permanent fire stations, located geographically to provide the quickest, most efficient response to the areas with the densest populations that generate the preponderance of emergency calls. Given the costs of staffing and operating a station, it didn’t make financial or operational sense to keep all of those stations open.

It should be noted that a popular misconception in recent years is that the old Silverthorne fire station at 401 Blue River Parkway served as a response station until Summit Fire vacated it in 2019. In fact, since 2003, there had been no firefighters stationed there, and emergency response in Silverthorne primarily has been covered by the SF&EMS station in Dillon all this time.

Nope. They're actually deemed a safety hazard, as too many firefighters rushing to emergencies would land poorly and sprain ankles or worse. Fire departments around the country have moved away from them, often, as is the case with the design of this new station, building single-story firehouses. (Summit Fire & EMS stations in Frisco and Dillon still have their original fire poles, but they are no longer in use.)

Want some interesting history? The fire pole first was invented in the late 19th Century, back when firefighters sped to fires on horse-drawn wagons. Back at the fire station, the ground floor was set aside as stables for the horses, and the firefighters' living quarters were upstairs. Horses, being curious animals, were known to climb staircases, which upset more than one fire crew interrupted during their dinner by a snorting, pooping horse in their kitchen. So firefighters installed spiral staircases, with the radii and narrow widths serving as a perfect barrier for horses -- but posing a very, very tricky route back down, especially for firefighters in a hurry. The answer came in the form of fire poles, which allowed firefighters to get down to the horses and wagons quickly. It's all described right here, courtesy of the indisputable Smithsonian magazine: How an Ingenious Fireman Brought a Pole into the Fire House.