Ottawa Fire Services needs a new training facility and is asking for help to build one

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Ottawa Fire Services is in need of a new training facility and is calling on partners to help build one.

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The service’s current main training facility, a campus on Industrial Avenue near St-Laurent Boulevard, was built in the mid-1970s. It is outdated and will soon be unable to operate at all, leaving the service in a bind as training demands increase.

“When it was built, it was at the end of a road basically in a field,” David Matschke, deputy chief of operations, said in an interview Thursday. “It is now surrounded by industrial, commercial and, recently, residential occupations. That’s the one that’s really hitting us hard because we make a mess and there’s a lot of noise and a lot of smoke. The houses and those things around the current place are a challenge because of the concern of the neighbors.”

To make matters worse, an eight-story condominium tower is being built on land adjacent to the facility. People who will live there will be affected by smoke and flames from the burning structure where firefighters learn how to fight the flames.

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“It’s about a year and a half away, and that’s what we think our deadline is going to be,” said Louise Hine-Schmidt, deputy director of training and safety. “When there are people living there, they will probably close us down.”

Hine-Schmidt also noted that the current site did not have enough space for classrooms and many of the basic necessities of a modern training facility, such as women’s locker rooms.

“It has outgrown its use for us. It’s just not suitable anymore,” she said.

A new facility is urgently needed, Hine-Schmidt and Matschke said, especially since new Ontario legislation will require some Ottawa firefighters to undergo additional training, a prospect that will likely overburden current facilities the service has to work with.

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OFS wants to build a state-of-the-art facility, a 40-acre campus with outdoor training yards, wooded areas for search and rescue, fire structures for fighting fires, roadways for vehicle collisions and, ideally, an indoor facility for they can train to fight fires year-round, which they currently cannot do.

But such a facility would be expensive, with pre-pandemic estimates of more than $80 million, including the cost of the land. Now, due to increases in material costs and inflation, that number is likely to be much higher.

It is a sum that the service and the city cannot pay. “We have to remember that we are just a service within the city,” Matschke said, “and there are always other pressures from the city that are there, too, that we are competing against, but I think we are on the right track now. ”

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So the service is looking for partners to help. It has issued a request for expressions of interest, a REOI for short, to test the waters and see if a private or government partner would jump in to help fund the project.

“We have 25 percent of the money and we’re looking at partnerships to get to the other 75 percent,” Matschke said.

In addition, the service hopes that a potential partner can provide land where the new facility can be built.

The land would provide OFS with a quick solution to some of the problems it has with its current outdated training facility: it could move a transportable burning structure there in the near future and continue firefighting training without disturbing nearby residents. .

Matschke and Hine-Schmidt said they were optimistic about partners materializing, possibly at the government level, and potentially a party that wanted to conduct research, for which the new facility would be ideal.

But even in an ideal situation, the facility would take years to plan and build, and the service already faces training challenges as it moves firefighters and recruits to several smaller facilities.

“We’re driving right now,” Hine-Schmidt said. “We use everything we have all the time, and we’re not done with it yet.”