A LARGE MAJORITY OF DALLAS, TEXAS’, 53 FIRE STATIONS are so decrepit that they are nearly untenable.  Whenever something breaks that requires maintenance or repairing, the city has been ignoring the problems while their buildings deteriorate.

Today’s Dallas Morning News is reporting that at one station, for example, an unfixed plumbing problem routinely causes raw sewage to back up onto the bathroom floors.  Several stations have leaking roofs that pour buckets of water into the buildings whenever it rains.  At another station the emergency generator only works occasionally.

The infamous Sta. 35, one of the unhealthiest
firehouses in the city.  (DFD photo)

The Morning News reports:

Dallas’ fire stations have fallen victim to years of shoestring budgets and staffing cutbacks that have left city maintenance workers overwhelmed, understaffed and unable to meet the repair demands of more than 500 city buildings, city officials said. Requests for repairs, minor and major, sent to the city’s Equipment and Building Services go undone – sometimes for years – as roughly 1,500 firefighters make do at stations across the city. Some firefighters even do painting and remodeling themselves.

Big D already spends 45 percent less on average on building upkeep than comparable cities, according to a 2006 benchmarking report conducted by the International City/County Management Association.

And an already-grim situation may get worse: The recent multimillion-dollar budget crunch has the city considering slashing the building upkeep budget 52 percent. Half of 144 staff positions could be cut. Half of all work orders would be delayed. 

“It takes an act of Congress to get something fixed,” firefighter Ed Levell lamented. “When we call in with something that’s broke, they’ll send out two men in a truck and they say, ‘Yep, it’s broke.’ We don’t need anyone to confirm that it’s broke. We know it’s broke.”

Read the complete article HERE.

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