A space crunch at Burnaby’s main fire hall has the city looking at relocating the fire department’s nerve centre.
The department's busy, in-house dispatch centre, currently housed at Fire Station 1 on Sperling Avenue, handled more than 13,000 emergencies last year, according to documents posted on the BC Bid website.
The centre also deals with a multitude of other public inquiries and intradepartmental communications every year.
But it takes up about 500 square metres of space at a fire hall that “outgrew its capacity more than a decade ago” and needs more space to meet current and future Burnaby Fire Department needs, according to the documents.
The city is looking into moving the centre to the second floor of Fire Station 7 at 3151 Gilmore Diversion.
It plans to hire a consultant by the end of December to conduct a feasibility study and provide conceptual design options for the new centre.
A report on the study should be complete by July.
The Gilmore fire hall was built in 2009. The Sperling hall was built in 1970.
Burnaby has retained its own fire-dispatch service while many other Lower Mainland municipalities have joined E-Comm, a multi-city agency created in 1997 to provide shared emergency communications operations for police and fire in the region.
