Cambridge Fire Department to Build New Fire Training Facility

The Cambridge Fire Department will construct a new stand-alone training facility on Cambridge Street to maintain its “superior” class one insurance rating, the city announced last week.

The new training space is a reflection of the city’s growing population, according to Thomas Cahill, acting chief of the fire department. The Fire Suppression Rating Schedule, a national standard for fire safety used to calculate premiums for home insurance, holds fire departments to a higher safety standard as their population increases.

Cahill said that rating has important implications for both businesses and residents. According to the Federal Emergency Management Agency report, a better rating “can reduce the amount of insurance premiums paid by taxpayers.”

Though the new facility had been in planning for several years, the threat of losing the city’s prized class one Insurance Services Office rating — which puts it in the top 1 percent of fire departments in the country — spurred them into action.

“We realized that we had a need,” Cahill said. “We didn’t realize how serious the need was until we found out the impact that it has on our ISO rating.”

The building will be built next to the existing East Cambridge firehouse at 175 Cambridge St., and is expected to take roughly six months to complete.

Jeremy Warnick, a spokesperson for the city, said the was currently establishing safety perimeters for the project.

The fire department is expecting to break ground over the next few weeks.

The Insurance Services Office rating is critical for the city of Cambridge and the Cambridge Fire Department. Warnick says that a requirement for a class one ISO rating motivated the push for the fire department to have a “separate and stand-alone fire training facility.”

The ISO rating process analyzes data using the Fire Suppression Rating Schedule to provide a classification from class one to class 10. The Cambridge Fire Department’s class one rating is supposed to be an indicator to residents that their fire protection services are “superior.”

Since 2010, the number of residents in Cambridge has increased by 12.6 percent.

“As these things change, so does the ISO requirements. So we constantly want to be one step ahead of where we need to be,” Cahill said.

Although the firefighters in training will still use other facilities to practice with controlled live fires, the Cambridge center will allow for “quite a bit of training,” according to Cahill.

It will be equipped with a standpipe system to simulate real fire circumstances, a confined space to practice below-ground rescues, a smoke simulator, and rearrangeable wall panels. The range of props will help firefighters prepare for field conditions like low visibility from smoke or navigation through obstacles.

Warnick said the construction would not majorly affect the property’s neighbors, emphasizing that “the build is exclusively on fire department property.”

“It should have no impact from a safety perspective on residents in the area,” he said.