Firefighters in Liberec are building a new operations center for 60 million

Liberec - Firefighters in Liberec are building a new operations center. The Liberec regional fire brigade is currently the only one in the country that has its main operations center in temporary facilities. A new multifunctional building is rising on the site of former garages. The building, costing 60 million crowns, with garages, warehouses, and facilities is being constructed by the company CGM Czech from Říčany. If everything goes according to plan, the center should be operational by the end of next year, said Roman Hlinovský, director of the Liberec regional fire rescue service, to ČTK today.
     "We are the only ones who do not have a regional headquarters; we can do without new offices, but the operations center is a necessity for us," Hlinovský remarked. The current operations center no longer meets the needs, and especially in the hot summer months, it is a problem to cool the equipment, according to him. The outdated and relatively distant building on Barvířská Street in the center of Liberec, where the brigade's headquarters is located, also did not offer a solution.
     Therefore, it was decided to build a new building on the station's premises on Šumavská Street. "It is being built on the site where the steel garages stood, which we demolished," Hlinovský said. A three-story building is rising in their place. The ground floor will have garages for mobile fire equipment and personal vehicles, just like before. The second floor will contain warehouses, and on the third floor, there will be the regional operations and information center and the emergency call center 112, including technical support, offices, and crisis management rooms.
     The construction of the building is financed by the General Directorate of the Fire Rescue Service, while the purchase of new equipment for the operations center will be funded by European funds. "The new equipment will allow for the unification of technologies within the integrated rescue system in the future so that firefighters, police, and ambulance services can share information without having to pass it on complicatedly as they do now," Hlinovský explained. Without the new building, however, the firefighters in Liberec would have nowhere to place the new equipment.
Firefighters are not the only ones who will benefit from better conditions. By March next year, the regional police headquarters in Liberec is set to undergo renovations costing 50 million crowns, and a new operations center is part of the project. The regional emergency medical service is also preparing to build a new operations center. They received a subsidy from European funds for the project costing 47 million crowns. The new center will be built on the hospital premises and is expected to be operational from 2014.