With construction remaining on schedule, Summit Fire & EMS officials are hopeful the Silverthorne station currently being built will be operational by late spring.

Public information officer Steve Lipsher said, thanks to favorable weather in September and October, construction crews were able to make a lot of progress on the exterior of the building just in time for the colder weather late fall will bring. 

“It’s always encouraging when the construction managers are talking about buttoning up the exterior of the building (while) we’re still luxuriating in this wonderful warm, dry fall weather,” he said. 

He added it’s always a bonus to have a structure mostly enclosed and equipped with some auxiliary heating so crews can work efficiently and don’t have to weather through winter conditions. Next steps in construction include wrapping up work on the building’s siding and roofing before tackling construction on the building’s interior, which Lipsher said is slated to have a mountain aesthetic. 

While construction is right where it should be, according to Lipsher, he said efforts to curate a crew to man the station really “ramped up” this summer and is perhaps ahead of schedule. He said Summit Fire & EMS have recently added six new hires and anticipate adding a seventh sometime soon. 

“The idea is that it’s not going to be staffed solely by new hires, but a mix,” he said.

He added they are looking to have new hires trained and ready to go for when the station opens and want to have some more tenured employees on those shifts as well. 

Lipsher said this station will be consistently manned, but the number of employees could change seasonally based on demand. On a typical day at Summit Fire & EMS’s busiest stations, Frisco and Dillion, there are usually 3-4 people on the engine crew, 2-3 people on the medic crew and a battalion chief, Lipsher said. He said generally the minimum they will have on site for any station is a three-person engine crew and a two-person ambulance crew. 

With Silverthorne being the fifth Summit Fire & EMS station, the group can’t really gauge what the demand will look like until it’s up and running. Lipsher described the jurisdiction’s district boundary in the northern part of the county to be like “patchwork.” The Silverthorne station will respond to events in Silverthorne and north of the town all the way to the Grand County line. This area includes U.S. Forest Service lands. He said there’s a northern part of the county that, as a whole, isn’t technically in the district, but certain households have opted into the district. 

Summit Fire & EMS has a mutual aid agreement with Kremmling Fire Protection District to ensure effective emergency response in areas near Summit and Grand counties’ borders. Lipsher said for larger events Summit Fire will pull personnel from its other stations. 

The Silverthorne station will be located at 26300 Blue River Parkway. 

At previous Silverthorne Town Council meetings, elected officials and Summit Fire & EMS have discussed putting either a full traffic light or some type of emergency light in front of the station to ensure trucks can pull out onto the highway efficiently. Lipsher said he has not heard any updates on this front. 

He said the project remains on budget and will cost somewhere between $9 to $9.5 million.

Concerns from Silverthorne residents served as a driver behind the town getting its own station after not having one for several years. Residents shared worries about not having a station north of Interstate 70 since congestion near the interstate could cause response times to lengthen and become a public safety issue. Construction for the station began last spring.