PHOTOS: While giving a tour of the Taunton Fire Department’s new training facility, Fire Chief Steven Lavigne described the past challenges the department has faced when it comes to training. When not traveling to other parts of the state to conduct training exercises, the department usually has had to wait until the city acquired an abandoned property or a landowner in the city was donating or demolishing a property, Lavigne said.
“We would hit that [house] hard for days,” said Lavigne, with crews practicing such things as ladder drills, forcible entry scenarios, and cutting holes into the roof which is done to add ventilation, create an access point for helping trapped residents escape, or provide access for a fire hose.
Lavigne and city and state officials got together at 90 County St., the site of the city’s future public safety building for Police and Fire, on Tuesday, Aug. 19, to unveil this new training facility. Said Lavigne, this facility is an “investment in the community” that will allow the department “to prepare for the unpredictable challenges faced” at every fire emergency. “A well-trained department means faster and more effective response,” and the department now has “the tools and scenarios to sharpen our firefighters’ skills,” he said.
A game changer
Standing three floors high at 3,380 square feet total, the Taunton Fire Department’s new training facility, also known as a “burn building,” allows the staff to run exercises and conduct training whenever they want, as opposed to scheduling it elsewhere, with two of the closest other facilities being in Fall River and Carver, said Dan Pallotta, project manager for P3 Professionals, the entity overseeing the whole public safety building project.
The main features in the training facility are its three “burn rooms,” one on each floor for conducting drills on extinguishing fires. Each level has a burn room in order to simulate the different challenges a team will have with upper floors, as opposed to just the bottom main floor. The rooms, Lavigne said, are also used to teach and train “fire dynamics,” or how fires start, grow and travel.
Another room is meant to recreate different scenarios firefighters will face, such as forcible entry, collapsing floors, situations that require crawling in tight spaces, and drills where the firefighter is dealing with no visibility. The building has its own artificial smoke-generating machine which can pump smoke into any room for drills. The building also has a chimney for chimney operations drills, like putting out fires inside, whether from the base floor or rooftop. Both the second and third floor have rooftop access for various drills, including ladder, roof-cutting, and even rappelling from the rooftop via an anchor and rope.
How much did burn building cost?
Taunton’s Chief Financial Officer Patrick Dello Russo said the total cost for the burn building was $1.5 million. Lavigne said this is “money well spent,” and with proper care and maintenance, the fire department’s new burn building could last up to 50 years.
Part of new public safety complex
Voters in April 2023 approved via referendum election funding through a Proposition 2 1/2 debt exclusion the construction of a new joint public safety facility to house police and fire, who both have spent decades operating out of old and deficient buildings.
The proposal was approved unanimously by the City Council and brought forth by Mayor Shaunna O’ Connell who made finding a better home for public safety a priority for her administration. “This is a source of great pride and achievement,” that will “meet the needs of our first responders and the community,” said O’Connell about the entire public safety building project during the Aug. 19 unveiling of the new training facility.
Timothy Bradshaw, a former Taunton Fire Chief who retired in August 2023, attended the unveiling of the training facility. He recalled being told of “talks about needing new fire stations” going all the way back to the late 1970s when his grandfather was still a firefighter. “These are obsolete stations. These stations were built for horses,” said Bradshaw, referring to four of the five fire stations in the city, which were constructed in the 1800s.
Bradshaw recalled lobbying the O’Connell administration hard for a training facility to be part of the public safety project because of how critical the need was. “What can I get them to pay for that they didn’t see coming? You are looking at it,” Bradshaw joked during the unveiling, while also saying how happy he is for the fire department’s future.
Nearby cities and towns want to use new Taunton training facility
Lavigne said he has already received interest from fire departments in North Attleboro, Easton, Mansfield, Norton and other nearby communities for their staff to train at Taunton’s new facility. This will come down to individual agreements with each community, he said, which usually entails sharing the costs of materials and resources used for training exercises. He also said, due to liability and safety reasons, Taunton firefighters have to be present on site at all times when other municipal departments are training in the burn building.
Training facility won’t be used until public safety complex opens
Despite the burn building being completed, Lavigne said the Fire Department can’t start training with it until the whole public safety building project is complete and the site is officially turned over to the city by P3 Professionals in early December.
Cost and timetable
The referendum approved was for appropriating $67.7 million of a total $79.1 million cost for the whole project through a 30-year debt exclusion. Back in April 2024, the O’Connell administration announced the project was coming in at least $8-10 million under the previous budget estimation thanks to lower bids.
CFO Dello Russo told the Gazette the public safety building itself is roughly 80% complete right now, so a determination of whether more budgets savings are coming, and how this will impact residents’ property taxes via the debt exclusion, won’t be determined until the whole project is complete. At the time of the referendum vote in April 2023, estimates from the O’Connell administration were the debt exclusion would raise property taxes for the average home by $156 annually. Dello Russo said the timetable hasn’t changed, with the belief the public safety building will be ready for occupation by the end of 2025 or early 2026.
