Berkeley, Albany split $500,000 in federal funding for fire training
Firefighters around the East Bay frequently need to work together, and for that reason, they want to train together. U.S. Rep. Lateefah Simon announced a $500,000 federal allocation Tuesday for firefighters in Berkeley and several nearby communities to do just that.
Berkeley Fire Department Chief David Sprague said officials are hoping to put the money toward a facility to simulate structure fires, though the details of the project, including when and where it would be built, are still to be decided. Firefighters from Albany, Berkeley, El Cerrito, Kensington and Richmond, as well as countywide agencies in Alameda and Contra Costa Counties, have formed a consortium to train together and share facilities.
The funds, split between Berkeley and Albany, are part of an $11.2 million allotment Simon secured for 15 different projects around her East Bay district for shoreline park development, university research and equipment, violence prevention and intervention programs and a hodgepodge of other infrastructure upgrades.
Simon’s office originally requested $3 million for the consortium, according to her official webpage. On Tuesday she acknowledged that the $500,000 that came back was just “a drop in the bucket in terms of what we have to do in terms of federal, state and local electeds to bring more resources to public safety.”
On the other hand, Simon said, “It’s not oftentimes in this moment, in this administration, where we can come together and say, ‘We’re bringing money back home.’”
BFD’s facilities are already getting upgrades
Simon’s visit Tuesday included a tour of a facility the Berkeley Fire Department has built at Ninth and Gilman streets to house the city’s Emergency Operations Center and administrative offices that were previously distributed across four different sites.
BFD determined years ago that all 10 of its facilities need at least extensive remodeling or renovation, and in most cases, complete replacement or relocation. The master plan for fire facilities was projected to cost the city up to $372 million as of 2023.
The training facilities BFD has used lately were built half a century ago or earlier, “when the mission of the organization was substantially more narrow,” Sprague said Tuesday. Since then call volumes have skyrocketed, nearly tripling between 1995 and 2022. Firefighters and paramedics have had to take on new kinds of emergency calls and fires themselves have evolved as more household goods are built out of quick-burning synthetics and lithium ion batteries have proliferated.
When BFD asked the City Council for permission to lease six parcels on Eighth and Ninth streets in 2024, part of the department’s reasoning was that its training facility on Cedar Street was already “packed beyond capacity with personnel,” the single classroom there was too small and the department needed more classrooms.
On top of that, since the Cedar Street site is in a residential area, it “has created an untenable situation for neighbors and unrealistic limitations” on how and how late firefighters can train there, Sprague wrote to the council in 2023.
When the new six-part site is completed it will also house the city’s Fire Prevention Division, academy classes for aspiring firefighters and other training facilities for professional firefighters and paramedics. The funding announced Tuesday, however, may go to constructing a training simulation facility elsewhere in Berkeley or outside the city entirely.
Moving some of BFD’s offices into Northwest Berkeley has the added benefit of freeing up space in the city’s main public safety building downtown on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, where the emergency dispatch center has outgrown its office space.
One of the parcels will act as a “reserve firehouse,” Sprague said, so while BFD upgrades the rest of its facilities around the city, crews can use the Gilman District complex “instead of having them living in a construction site.”The Gilman District facility also houses BFD’s employee wellness center which, Sprague said, is “on the cutting edge for our profession.” Firefighters and paramedics can use the center for working out, rehab, nutrition advice and building “mental immunity” to the stress of running into fires, chemical leaks and car crashes for a living, Sprague said Tuesday.