On Saturday, November 14, from 2 to 4 p.m., Tualatin Valley Fire & Rescue firefighters will provide tours of the new Station 70 located at 8299 SW Beaverton-Hillsdale Highway in Raleigh Hills. A brief ceremony and ribbon cutting will take place at 2:15 p.m. The community celebration will include an i ce cream social and fire safety house activities for children.
Station 70 began serving the communities of Raleigh Hills and West Slope on October 1. TVF&R's typical station standard is 10,540 square feet. This station will serve its intended purpose of responding to a high volume of medical calls using the smallest footprint possible - 1,950 square feet. TVF&R purchased a commercial building and converted it for use as a two-person station with one medic unit. This is the first TVF&R station with horizontal, four-fold apparatus bay doors that open in less than half the time of a traditional overhead door for the medic unit's ingress and egress.
The decision to locate a fire station in Raleigh Hills was based on an analysis of 6,473 incidents over a five-year period, which confirmed that siting Station 70 at Southwest Beaverton-Hillsdale Highway and Laurelwood Avenue would improve TVF&R's response times to emergency medical incidents. The station will respond to an estimated 1,300 incidents annually and service nearly 6,000 addresses.
Station 70 Captain/Paramedic Patrick Fale states, "Providing fast and reliable emergency medical service to the Raleigh Hills community is my top priority for this station. A high volume of calls in this area result in patient care for chest pain, falls, motor vehicle accidents, and breathing problems. These are serious medical issues - ones that we want to get to quickly and mitigate the progression of whatever is happening with the patient."
The new station will operate during peak incident hours Tuesday through Friday from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. Outside of these hours, neighboring TVF&R Stations 53 and 65 will respond to emergency service calls. This project was one of many partially funded by a $77.5 million general obligation bond for capital improvements that was passed in November 2006 by voters within TVF&R's service area.