Toccoa Unveils New Fire Training Facility

The city of Toccoa unveils its new fire training facility.

City and community leaders gathered with fire fighters to hold a ribbon cutting and open house for the new burn building on Monday.

Toccoa Fire Chief Tommy Ayers said that the facility will make training a lot easier for his department.

“We will be training locally and will not have to go to Forsyth,” said Ayers. “We already have three state-certified instructors and we will be certifying our new people coming on, so they will not have to be going to down there (to Forsyth) and staying eight weeks at a time. We can do all kinds of training, ladder, rope. It is going to benefit us a lot.”

Also, Stephens County volunteer fire fighters will be able to use the facility for their training.

inside-fire-facilityAyers went on to say that this building is the result of a lot of hard work by firefighters.

“We did every bit of the work, all of the welding of the steps and the building painting,” said Ayers. “Give credit to all of the firemen.”

Toccoa Mayor Evan Hellenga said that the new facility is something that the city can be proud of.

“It is a great opportunity for our fire fighters to have a place to train,” said Hellenga. “It is something we talked about in our January planning meeting and now you can see it has come to fruition. The thing is we actually did a majority of the work in-house, so we did it ourselves. It brought the cost down considerably. I am very proud of it and I am proud of our fire fighters.”

The new City of Toccoa Fire Training Facility is located at Alewine Park on Alewine Drive in Toccoa, near the James A. Neal Training Center that the police department uses.