Construction has begun on the Highland Park Fire Station and Training Centre, a 26,000-square-foot facility intended to serve Airdrie’s northeast and support both operational deployment and firefighter training. The facility, which broke ground on May 12, is scheduled to open in November 2026.
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One day after the groundbreaking, Fire Chief Mike Pirie presented a detailed design update to Airdrie’s Community Safety and Social Services Standing Committee. He said the project is advancing on time and on scope, with final design choices shaped by past lessons and internal performance targets.
"It’s not simply a traditional fire station," Pirie told the committee on May 13. "When you add the training tower, the classrooms, the ECC — it means a lot more people need to be involved, and a lot more consideration given as to how one piece impacts the other."
The station, first proposed in Airdrie’s 2013 fire master plan, is designed to improve response coverage in the city’s northeast. Pirie said the build emphasizes long-range functionality, circulation efficiency, and health-protective zoning.
"It truly moves from a concept to a real project," he said.
Matt Elgie, president of the Airdrie Professional Firefighters Association, said the facility has the potential to raise frontline capacity — if matched by staffing and activation planning.
"The opening of the Highland Park fire station is a really significant advancement just for the ability of our firefighters to serve and protect the community," Elgie told DiscoverAirdrie in a May 21 interview. "It allows us to be in a position to respond more quickly and effectively, and it puts us in the communities that we need to be in."
He said the site will help close a longstanding infrastructure gap.
"We’ve been trying to meet the standards set out in [the] 2013 master plan for quite some time," Elgie said. "It means we’ll be able to perform at a higher level, doing more of the things that we train to do in the communities that we are trying to serve in and around Airdrie."
The building includes four apparatus bays — two configured for full drive-through use and two set up as double-stack lanes, similar to Chinook Winds Station. The bays are five feet longer than previous builds. Traffic signals on Veterans Boulevard will be GPS-synced to clear departures from Bay 1.
"It’s not practical to back up off of the main road without disrupting traffic," Pirie said.
Internal design places noisy or contaminated processes along the south wall. Self-Contained Breathing Apparatus (SCBA) compressors, gear wash stations, and hazardous runoff handling are isolated from living quarters and pressurized to prevent airborne crossover.
"These areas also represent noisy processes with lots of machinery," Pirie said. "Removing them here helps to reduce noise pollution inside the occupied areas."
Office and amenity space is designed for flexibility. The front lobby is compact, with an open desk pod for four staff, a conference room for eight, and modular offices near the fire prevention wing. Built-in millwork was avoided.
"Anytime we can avoid built-in options, that is the goal that the team has been presented," Pirie said.
The second floor contains dorms, a shared dayroom, and single-occupancy washrooms with full accessibility. A shared kitchen and laundry area sit above the ground-floor gym, matching Chinook Winds in size. Classrooms with divider walls and on-site storage will double as the city’s Emergency Coordination Centre, with pre-approved layouts for up to 70 personnel.
According to prior design documents presented to the council, the training yard includes a Class B live-fire tower — now in final procurement — which Pirie said on May 13 will simulate high-temperature interior scenarios such as kitchen and battery fires using clean-burning natural gas with no toxic plumes. Vehicle extrication and trench rescue drills will take place elsewhere in the gravel yard, supported by two exterior hydrants.
"Large plumes of black, toxic smoke are not needed for realistic training," Pirie said. "This is what modern fire training looks like."
Inside the building, all movement zones were designed using National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) chute-time geometry.
"There are actual formulas to measure distances through fire stations," Pirie said. "The layout was made to support chute times of 90 seconds."
Elgie said the station’s configuration — if matched with staffing — positions the city to meet national deployment benchmarks.
"It means it will decrease our reliance on other communities with our mutual aid partners," he said, adding that the station’s location and configuration will help close geographic gaps in deployment.
"It allows us to just put Airdrie firefighters responding to Airdrie emergencies."
Airdrie will expand firefighter training capabilities
Firefighters in Airdrie have not conducted live-fire training within city limits for more than a decade.
"In my entire nearly 20 years with the department, we have not had live fire training," Elgie said. "Even outside of Airdrie, where we have historically rented the Calgary Fire Department’s training tower, we haven’t done that in more than 10 years."
He said the Highland Park facility will change that.
"We’re going to be able to have live fire training exposed to people to high-intensity, very serious scenarios, while keeping them physically and mentally safe," he said. "And doing it in our own backyard."
Pirie told the committee on May 13 that the Class B tower will reach ceiling temperatures of 900°F, with ambient conditions around 500°F at eye level. The structure uses clean-burning natural gas and flame props to simulate high-temperature interior fire conditions.
"You’re using cameras to see heat inside of these buildings," he said. "There are all the traditional elements that would lend realism to past training… just in a much more repetitive way."
Pirie said realistic training no longer depends on dramatic visuals.
"It doesn’t stink, very realistic, hangs in the buildings you can’t see, and we get to practice all those things on a very repetitive basis," he told council in an April 15 presentation. "This is what modern fire training looks like."
"It’s an excellent [question]," Pirie said when asked about EV fire preparedness. "This is a North American topic — EV fires. Let’s just say battery fires are an issue, not just in vehicles. The current approach to them — there is no standardized approach. What we do know is they consume, let’s just say, massive amounts of water to cool battery systems."
"This type of training absolutely will facilitate that," he continued. "And we are actually hosting a group called Fire Safety Research Institute out of the States. It’s a well-known institution — we are hosting a symposium here on EV fires and inviting all of our neighbours to come in and start to learn."
"Right now, it’s just a lot of concepts — and a lot of water to cool down batteries."
FSRI researchers have been studying suppression strategies for several years — including the evolving risks posed by electric vehicle (EV) fires.
Adam Barowy with UL Research Institutes’ fire science division (FSRI), told DiscoverAirdrie that suppression tactics for EV fires remain widely inconsistent.
"There are two strategies: use copious amounts of water, or let it burn," he said. "They’re just opposite ends of kind of extreme approaches."
He said the difficulty lies in reaching the battery compartment.
"The battery pack is very difficult to get water inside," Barowy said. "What you’re doing is basically putting someone on a hand line and having them sit on it."
Estimates for water use in EV fires range from hundreds to tens of thousands of gallons. But Barowy said the issue is less about volume and more about precision.
"What it really means is that the water is not getting where it needs to go," he said.
He said the challenge is exacerbated by the protective design of EVs themselves.
"They’ve designed [batteries] to be watertight," he said. "Now, if you’ve got one that’s on fire, you’re working sort of at a disadvantage."
Barowy emphasized that traditional tactics are still valid if the fire is caught early.
"If you can knock out a car fire before it gets to the battery, that can be the easiest of all situations to deal with."
Barowy said departments don’t need to chase new equipment to stay current — just modern tactics.
"Our resources are free," he said. "At that point, it’s just running training on what’s modern and available online."
Elgie called the upgraded facility a direct investment in prevention.
"We’re not exposing [crews] to the same health hazards and long-term carcinogenic effects of the job," he said. "They’re still going to do all the things that they need to do in order to provide service to the people in the community."
Planning for people
Elgie said the Highland Park build is a generational opportunity, but one that comes with workload realities.
"Right now, we have one training officer who's responsible for all of our recruit classes, all of our continuing education, and the ongoing training that all of the fire department endeavours in," he said. "I'm sure that there's going to need to be some reinforcements in different areas of the department just to bring enough staff on in order to move the station forward and make it fully functional."
He said the city’s population has jumped by 20,000 since 2018 — and projections suggest Airdrie will exceed 100,000 residents within the next five to seven years.
"We've gone from 68,000 in 2018 to around 88,000 [The city's 2024 census count is 85,805] in 2024," Elgie said. "So, will we have enough staff on hand to address the needs of the community five years from now? Or are we going to need more than what is currently planned?"
He said the station’s launch — and the associated hiring phase — must be viewed as the start of a longer resourcing arc.
"If there was a publicly available plan for what the next 10 years of staffing looks like... that might be a different conversation," he said. "But those are multiple budget cycles ahead."
Deputy Mayor Candice Kolson inquired about the progress of staffing plans during an April 15 council presentation, prior to the groundbreaking.
"We're not staffing all at once in 2026?" she asked.
"We haven’t brought anybody on yet," Pirie replied. "There's two elements here I want to explore. The building has more offices than we would be filling... So the idea is that it can support operations for 50 years. The intent would be to bring on staff in 2026 to staff the facility so that it can open and have a functioning engine out of there, along with moving a fire prevention officer from our headquarters to the northeast..."
Kolson asked for clarification on how many staff are needed, and he noted that the staffing request would be coming soon.
"It's 24 people," he said. "The training officer that we have today would likely be moving there as well. I don't want to say there's zero staff, but the majority of staff are not hired."
Elgie said the department’s growth is being shaped in part by past shortages.
"There was a time when one-third of the city was being underserved, because there were only three firefighters on that ladder truck," he said, referring to earlier operations out of Chinook Winds Station. "We were able to grow the department by enough people to put a fourth firefighter regularly on that truck, and that was a huge gain for the community."
He said those lessons are now guiding future readiness.
"If we can put the right amount of firefighters on our trucks — which is putting four firefighters on the engine — it means there’s four firefighters in each of those stations at a minimum," he said. "And as long as we keep continuing down that trajectory, I don't think we have to be concerned about the sky falling."
He added that a fourth station will reduce Airdrie’s dependence on mutual aid.
"It allows us to just put Airdrie firefighters responding to Airdrie emergencies," he said. "Every time we can put an Airdrie [unit] out the door... I think it benefits the community greater than relying on someone else to do our work for us."
He said the station’s capacity matters not only for response time, but for recruitment, safety, and retention.
"It’s going to allow our people to respond and show their skills in making people's lives better with what they do on their calls," Elgie said.
Cost decisions and firefighter-driven design
May 13 committee documents confirmed that several elements of the Highland Park Fire Station and Training Centre remain unfunded or were scaled back during value engineering.
Eliminated items include internal self-contained breathing apparatus (SCBA) air fill stations, alerting systems, and dedicated solar energy infrastructure. Asphalt surfaces were reduced by 40 per cent in favour of hard-packed gravel, while HVAC was replaced by zoned climate control. Room sharing shaved more than 300 square metres from the initial layout.
Elgie said the final result still meets operational needs.
"My understanding of what those cost-cutting measures were is that they were around nice-to-have esthetic things, and there were differences between the type of materials used in the parking and training areas, you know, asphalt versus packed gravel and other things," he said. "So I think that they've made some choices where they can save money where they can, and it's really just being super responsible with the money and the budget that they've been allocated."
He said the project team prioritized core functionality.
"What was cut was necessary, and what has been kept is also necessary," he said. "They really have this project, from what I've seen, down to a needs-only methodology."
Firefighters were involved throughout the design.
"We have 11 of our members involved in different levels of consultation in the planning process," Elgie said. "There has been lots of involvement from the front-line firefighters."
He said that input helped shape specific aspects of the build.
"Sometimes it's little things... it's things that you don't necessarily understand the importance of, how you position a door or how you plan the flow of traffic or the airflow within the building," he said. "Unless you have been a firefighter carrying bags of gear and equipment in and out of the station as you're moving from one location to another... it's really difficult for engineers and planners and architects to manage those things."
He said those micro-adjustments matter — particularly for firefighter health and safety.
"Are there enough areas of isolation within the station to keep the clean side of the building clean with clean air and proper air flow?" he said. "And the areas of the building that must be exposed to some of those nasty materials, isolated and keep everybody as safe as we can physically."
Pirie told the committee on May 13 that each new fire hall is informed by the last.
"Every station should be better than the one before it," he said. "Our Chinook Winds Station was designed when we were an integrated service... that’s an example of how design can impact function."
What comes next
Elgie said the next phase will test every part of the department's infrastructure — including internal systems the public doesn't see.
"Right now, we have one training officer who's responsible for all of our recruit classes, all of our continuing education and the ongoing training that all of the fire department endeavours in," he said.
Earlier, during the May 13 committee session, council turned its attention to longer-term integration and infrastructure questions — including EMS co-location and facility lifespan. Mayor Peter Brown used the session to ask whether the new facility could house future EMS operations.
"There is no plan for AHS to be in this facility, nor have they actually made the request to do so," Pirie said.
Director of Community Safety and Social Services Kevin Weinberger said discussions with Alberta Health Services date back nearly a decade.
"We did reach out to Alberta Health Services back — oh, I want to say 2015, 2016 — when we purchased the land," Weinberger said. "At that time, they had no interest in sharing in there. I’d say the last time we had discussions with them was probably 2020, and again they were well set up for their two locations that they currently have."
Brown also asked about the lifespan of Airdrie’s other three fire halls.
"Those existing facilities are well-built," Pirie said. "Typically, 25 years is the midlife. We're not there yet, but the mechanical and electrical systems — they don't last 50 years."
Pirie said Highland Park’s mechanical rooms were designed for easier upgrades.
"All the mechanical rooms, for example, are accessible from the exterior, have double doors — things like that," he said.
The mayor also asked whether artificial intelligence would change how fire services are planned.
"I think AI is going to drastically impact how we plan protective services," Pirie said. "Predictive technology to say, historically, this is what you've done — this is where the work should be."
He said new data tools will eventually assist decision-making.
"I actually think it's going to make us a lot more efficient and free us up to lead our teams versus write reports and interpret data," he said. "It's very labour intensive right now to take data and mine it and make decisions."
Elgie said the next phase demands full commitment — not just construction.
"We got the shovel in the ground there last week... now let's give these guys everything that they need to keep the construction project on track," he said.
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