Earlier this week, Dearborn Heights Mayor Mo Baydoun announced the city is getting a brand-new fire station.
The $10 million project is being funded through federal and state grants.
The current Dearborn Heights Fire Department headquarters is located on Beech Daly Road near Ford Road and Crestwood High School.
"I have visited the station many times. It's not in a safe condition, and I would hate for that old station to collapse or something dangerous happened to our firefighters," said Zouhair Abdel Hak, a Dearborn Heights resident.
Dearborn Heights Fire Chief David Brogan says that during heavy traffic, the location causes challenges for fire trucks going on runs.
"Crossing that road 16 times a day is dangerous for everyone. We're as careful as we can be, but also with the school getting out, the cars are backed up here, and the kids are walking by; it's just not an ideal location for our fire station," Brogan said.
The building was built in 1999, but according to Phil Hall, the deputy fire chief, there were some construction flaws.
"What ended up happening after doing the core samples around the station, they found out that the foundation itself has kind of stayed in place. But what's happening to all of the interior, the floors, and things is that they're pushing up. We started noticing cracks, like in masonry walls, and that kind of really became a major concern for us, especially in relation to safety for our firefighters," Hall said.
As you walk down the hallway, you can see, in addition to cracks in the walls and sagging wallpaper, there's evidence of water damage from a leaky roof, plus parts of the ceiling have been cut out because of a black mold infestation.
"The citizens of Dearborn Heights built the station in 1999, thinking that this was going to be, you know, a 50-year-plus building. And now here we are, you know, like, three decades later, saying, like, hey, we need, we need this new station," Hall said.
Stakes mark the spot where the new Chief Brogan station will be built.
"It's certainly nothing I ever expected, and I look at it as a reflection of all of the people that I've worked with; there's no one individual that can be successful here; yet it requires teamwork. Firefighting is a team sport," Brogan said.
It's located more than a mile away on what is now a golf course.
"When we did a GIS study through the International Association of Firefighters, they took all of our runs for a three-year period of time which included our mutual aid responses. And they compressed that data and they came up with a location," Hall said.
The new location should improve response times, and because of its new construction, it'll be much safer for the full-staffed fire department.
"They deserve the best because they have been doing a great job," Abdel Hak said.
The project is scheduled to break ground in September and is expected to take a little less than a year to complete.