By Jay Compton

jay.compton@middlesboronews.com

The city of Pineville held a ribbon-cutting ceremony on Monday to mark the completion of renovation to the Fire Department building.

Last year, the department was able to purchase a slightly used truck with a 100-foot ladder for well under $100,000. The truck give them the capability to reach to the top of the Highrise in Newtown and every other building within their jurisdiction. The only issue was that the new truck was too long to fit inside the fire station.

Because the purchase of the truck came in so far under budget, the city was able to invest about $400,000 into extending the station and adding an upstairs training room. Construction on those renovations was just finished last week, and the department hosted a meeting of the Pineville City Council on Monday.

“This is good for the safety of the city, it means our fire department has additional training facilities. It’s going to help our men be better fire fighters, they’ll be better trained and that’s good for the community as a whole,” Mayor Scott Madon said. “We just got that new fire truck. We kind of got the cart before the horse, but that fire truck became available and we got a good deal on it.”

The truck was being stored at the city’s maintenance building but can now sit inside the fire station.

Previously, the firefighters had to pull the trucks out of the station to have the space to hold their weekly training sessions. Now, they have a dedicated space upstairs where they can all meet.

“This is something we’ve been working toward for years. We needed to upgrade and expand.

When I first started here, we had two engines and one little bitty brush truck. Now we’ve got four full-sized and extra full-sized fire trucks in-house,” said Fire Chief James Miracle, who has been a member of the department for 32 years. “Plus the training room — we’ve never had anything like that before. We would just all pile up in the living room and be sitting on top of one another. Now we have a good learning facility so that we can get a lot done.”

Madon said he was “tickled” for the city’s firefighters to have more space for training. He added that he was especially proud to have been the mayor when the station was originally built in the early ‘90s and to be serving again during the expansion.

“This fire department is exactly what you want to see as mayor. They come in and do their jobs, they’re willing to help with anything we ask them to do, and we never hear any complaints about them,” he said. “They take a lot of pride in what they do and they are very deserving of this new space.”