Pasco County broke ground on what will be the rebuilt Station 13 in Wesley Chapel, with its latest station designed with firefighter health in mind.

  • Firefighter health first priority in new Pasco stations
  • Stations designed to protect firefighters from cancer causing substances
  • New regulations make sure gear, firefighters are properly decontaminated

“When I first came into the job, if you didn’t have soot and dirt all over you when you walked out of the fire, you didn’t fight fire. Now, we’re the exact opposite. We try to protect the body as much as possible,” said Pasco County Fire Rescue Deputy Chief of Administration Andrew Fossa.

Fossa said PCFR spent nearly $3 million building or rebuilding five stations in a two-year period. The goal is to protect firefighters from substances that could cause cancer, the leading cause of death among the profession, according to the International Association of Firefighters.

One of those is Station 12 in Holiday. It includes an extractor to separate carcinogens from gear, as well as a climate-controlled room with an exhaust system designed to pump out remaining dangerous particles. In the truck bays, a vent sucks out vehicle fumes.

“It’s amazing because that means they care about their guys and girls and now we feel better about coming off of a fire,” said firefighter Jesus Martinez, who works at Station 13.

Martinez said he became a firefighter ten years ago because he wanted to help the community, and the camaraderie among his brothers and sisters in service quickly became another highlight of the job. Through the years, he’s seen some of them struggle with health issues.

“Some of them have cancer and have beat it, and some of them haven’t. It’s definitely a scary thing now to see day in and day out that we could be breathing those chemicals in,” Martinez said.

Fossa said incorporating such features into future stations will continue and will even be taken to the next level with the construction of a new Wesley Chapel station in the coming months. This station will have a shower area firefighters have to enter into before they can access other parts of the station, preventing the spread of carcinogens throughout the station.

“That’s something that you don’t see very many Florida stations doing. That’s something that’s going to be groundbreaking for us,” Fossa said.

PCFR is also rolling out a new set of regulations to make sure gear and firefighters themselves are properly decontaminated when leaving a scene.