HOLLYWOOD — The crew at Fire Station 82 has spent years working under a ceiling an engineer told them not to trust, and this week the city finally agreed to fix it.
The council approved funding to seismically retrofit the Hollywood firehouse, an aging station whose apparatus bay — the tall garage where the engine and truck wait to roll — was flagged in a structural inspection as vulnerable in a major earthquake. The concern is specific and, to firefighters, maddening: a bay that fails in a quake can trap the very equipment meant to respond to it, sidelining a station at the moment the neighborhood needs it most.
“The whole point of a firehouse is that we get out the door in seconds. A bay that pancakes in a quake doesn’t just risk us, it risks the response for the whole district,” said Captain Miguel Arroyo, who has worked out of Station 82 for eleven years and has, by his own account, brought the retrofit up at every community meeting that would have him. “We’ve been asking a long time. I stopped counting the meetings.”
The station is one of a set of older firehouses the department has been trying to bring up to current seismic standards, a slow and expensive campaign that competes each budget cycle with every other capital need in the city. Station 82’s request has surfaced repeatedly since the inspection and slipped down the list as often, a pattern a council staffer attributed to the plain shortage of construction dollars rather than any dispute about the need.
What moved it this year, according to the district office, was a combination of the inspection’s severity rating and the availability of a state seismic-safety grant that covers part of the cost, lowering the bill to the city enough to clear the project’s long-standing budget objection. The council vote authorizes design work to begin, with construction expected to start next year.
The retrofit brings a complication of its own. While the bay is rebuilt, the station’s engine and crew will operate from a temporary arrangement, and the department has not yet said publicly whether that means relocating the apparatus to a neighboring station or standing up a modular facility nearby. Arroyo said the crews have been promised the coverage gap will be managed, and that he intends to hold the department to it.
Residents who pushed alongside the firefighters counted the vote as overdue vindication. A neighborhood association president, Doris Whitfield, 70, who organized a petition two years ago, said she had grown so used to the request stalling that the approval briefly did not register. “I read the agenda item twice to be sure it was really this station and really this year,” she said. The design contracts go out this summer, and the crew, for the first time in years, has a date to point to.