A fire truck from Vadnais Heights Fire Department is parked on the street at night with emergency lights flashing, surrounded by flames and smoke from a nearby wildfire, with trees and a dark sky in the background.

our fire department

More Than Fighting Fires

Modern fire service means responding to nearly any emergency, and today's fire station wasn’t built for that. When the department was founded, most calls were fire emergencies.

Today, roughly 75% of the calls the fire department responds to are medical emergencies — alongside car crashes, hazardous material spills and complex rescues. VHFD has grown into what's called an "all-hazard" department, ready for nearly anything a resident might need.

Today’s fire station should be designed to meet that same range of demands, not just the fires that gave the department its name.

Illustration showing a small garage on the left transforming into a larger garage on the right.

did you know?

the fire station needs to almost double in size

The 2023 facility study found the fire department needs to expand to about 37,000 square feet to meet current and future demands — nearly doubling the station's existing footprint of 19,800 square feet.

What Daily Operations Require

A professional assessment of the current station identified real gaps between how the department operates today and what the building actually supports:

Clean separation from contamination. Turnout gear is currently stored in the apparatus bays, exposed to diesel particulates and sunlight that degrade it over time. A modern station separates "hot zones" (where contaminated gear and vehicles live) from "clean zones" (where crews eat, sleep, and recover) — protecting both equipment and firefighter health.
Exhaust that runs automatically. Diesel exhaust should clear the apparatus bay automatically as gas levels rise. It should not depend on someone remembering to flip a switch.
Dedicated decontamination space. Firefighters need a designated space to decontaminate after exposure to hazardous materials, separate from where they live and work.
Bunk rooms built for real rest. Sleep matters for duty crews who must remain ready to respond around the clock. That means sound separation between bunk rooms, and a clear, quick path from sleeping quarters to the apparatus bay when a call comes in.
Room to grow. Locker rooms, workspaces and medical supply storage all need to scale with staffing — not stay fixed at a size set decades ago.

Nighttime view of a tall ladder truck with red, blue, and white warning lights. The sign on the ladder reads 'VADNAIS HEIGHTS FIRE.' The sky in the background includes a few visible stars.

Firefighters in protective gear and helmets work at night, with equipment emitting bright light and smoke around them, indicating an emergency or fire scene.

Firefighters in protective gear working near a large fire truck with ladders and equipment, with a second red fire truck and trees in the background under a blue sky.

What a Modern Station Needs to Support

Beyond fixing what's broken, a modern facility needs to be built around the department's full scope of work:

Dedicated space for decontamination and gear storage, designed in from the start rather than retrofitted into rooms that were never meant for it.
Room for the whole fleet, including apparatus bays sized for today's larger vehicles and dedicated space for command vehicles, not split across two buildings.
Onsite training space, including support for hands-on, scenario-based drills — so crews can train during their shift, not just in theory.
Office and support space that scales with the department's staffing needs, now and in the future.
Community space large enough for public meetings and training, not borrowed from a room built for something else.

These aren't upgrades for their own sake.

They're the baseline for how a 24/7, all-hazard department needs to operate — and the current station simply wasn't built with any of this in mind. These challenges didn't appear overnight — and neither did our plan to address them.