News
July 10, 2008 - Saving energy, lives: $7.3 mil green facility located near downtown aims to improve response time for community
Scottsdale firefighter Nick Lorenz pointed to the Ikea-style kitchen in the city's new $7.3 million fire station and observed, "There isn't a single light turned on."
At Scottsdale's new Station 2, natural light streams through double-paned, high-visibility glass windows to save electricity.
There are waterless urinals, double-flush toilets, solar heat and systems to recycle "gray water" to irrigate landscaping.
The 12,000-square-foot, two-story firehouse near Indian School and Miller roads, is the second public building created under the city's 3-year-old "green initiative" that requires new and significantly renovated structures to meet the tough standards set by the United States Green Building Council.
The first was the Granite Reef Senior Center at Granite Reef and McDowell roads, opened in May 2006, using the council's gold standard Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, known as LEED standards.
The senior center's energy-saving techniques, including solar panels, lopped 48.3 percent, or $31,000, off the center's gas and electric bills last year, said Anthony Floyd, Scottsdale's green building program manager.
The new fire station was located near downtown to speed crews to new high-rise condominiums, lush shopping centers and older parts of south Scottsdale.
At the new fire station, the double-flush toilets - one for solids and one for liquid waste - and the waterless urinals are a bit of a curiosity.
"These (toilets) are a great example to show that we are fiscally responsible in a time of drought," Floyd said.
No one disagrees.
Firefighter Adam Arrington calls the waterless urinals, "interesting and different. I won't lie, I'm a first-time user."
Station 2 is the first of four in the pipeline designed to cut response times to four minutes 80 percent of the time.
In one throwback to the past, the two-story firehouse sports two "fire poles," the first in Scottsdale, to speed crews down to the bays and onto the city's bright green trucks.
But Lorenz said that on July 2, the station's second day of operations, crews not used to sliding down poles, took to the stairs, instead.
"Nobody used the poles," he said. "They do now."
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Publication: AZ Central
