Miller Hull

Many fire departments around the country are reimagining their facilities to provide safer and healthier environments for their people. Through a collaboration between Miller Hull, BNBuilders, the City of Bothell, and OAC Services, two new fire stations in Bothell — #42 and #45 — are among this new generation of firehouses that are better equipped to serve their firefighters and therefore the community.

But after voters passed the Safe and Secure Levy and Bond to fund the construction of these new stations, the City immediately faced a challenge—How can the existing outdated firehouses be replaced on the same sites while the department maintains full operations? By leveraging an innovative and flexible Progressive Design-Build delivery model, Miller Hull, BNBuilders, and OAC Services were each able to bring their respective expertise to quickly solve this problem. With Miller Hull developing test fits for potential interim station sites, BNBuilders providing live cost-modeling and phasing ideas, and OAC contacting property owners and real estate agents, the team conducted an in-depth investigation into dozens of potential interim operating scenarios in just a few short months.

This same spirit of enthusiastic, project-first collaboration allowed the team to quickly identify and deliver on the City’s and Fire Department’s top priorities.
First and foremost, the new facilities are designed to maximize firefighter health and wellbeing. In recent years, the elevated risk of cancer faced by firefighters has become much better understood, and implementing prevention measures like the ones outlined in the Washington State Council of Fire Fighters’ “Healthy In, Healthy Out” manual can help keep our first responders as safe as possible. Both fire stations will feature clearly defined red, yellow, and green zones; provide logical workflows with direct access to decontamination areas; and use easily cleanable, nontoxic interior materials. Additionally, the stations will include dedicated fitness areas, functional spaces for food preparation and recovery, and private bunks and showers to provide welcoming facilities for women and nonbinary firefighters.

The City also wanted the new firehouses to reflect the values of the community, thereby instilling civic pride. Although sited in very different contexts — Station 42 is in a historic downtown corridor, and Station 45 in a more commercial suburban neighborhood — the two stations will use a similar palette of durable materials and common systems strategies to streamline costs and develop a unified identity for the Bothell Fire Department. Station 42 will maximize the use of a challenging downtown site to provide a mixture of training space, fire-department-preferred drive-through bays, and expanded parking and conferencing space to support dual function as an Emergency Command Center. The building will also provide a welcoming new pedestrian scale entry, plaza, and public art piece.

Station 45 will be more compact with back-in bays that are designed to allow the iconic roll-up doors to visually engage the public at the scale and speed of the adjacent highway. It will feature more active units than the previous station and also provide a satellite office space for the Bothell Police Department to help them better serve the adjacent growing communities.

As a Progressive Design-Build project which emphasizes early and deep collaboration between all parties, the process to design and deliver the new Bothell Fire Stations 42 and 45 epitomizes the spirit of teamwork and service embedded in the firefighting community.

Project Team

Architect: The Miller Hull Partnership, LLP
Contractor: BNBuilders

EMission Zero Offset

In 2022, Miller Hull offset 24,264 tCO2e (tons of carbon) of twelve projects as part of our recently launched EMission Zero initiative — a program announced in 2021 targeting the elimination of greenhouse gas emissions in the built environment. A major component of EMission Zero is Miller Hull’s commitment to voluntarily purchase Green-E certified carbon offsets to cover the embodied emissions of each built project upon completion.