Raleigh has a new fire station unlike any other in the city
The Raleigh Fire Department’s Station 3 east of downtown is among the busiest of the city’s fire stations.
It’s also the smallest, but that will change Monday.
Station 3 will leave its home of the last 75 years on South East Street for a much larger building on Rock Quarry Road. The new 11,105-square-foot station, just south of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, is more than three times the size of the current one, with space and features the old building lacks, says Danny Poole, the assistant fire chief.
“They’ll be getting out of a very old station that’s cramped,” Poole said of the firefighters who will make the move. “We’re looking forward to this.”
The station has two bays and will initially be home to a single engine with a company of 12 firefighters. But it’s the first station in the city equipped to charge an electric fire engine, and when that comes online in the next few years, the station’s complement will double to 24, Poole said.
The new $11.5 million station also has a private room for evaluating patients and a decontamination room, where firefighters can remove hazardous materials from their gear without risk of contaminating their living quarters.
Raleigh has 28 fire stations, each numbered for the engine company it houses, with one exception. Engine 13 shares space in the downtown station with Engine 1, so there is no fire station 13. Poole says he’s not sure if that was done out of superstition or convenience, but it’s been that way since well before he joined the department in 1978.
This story was originally published April 25, 2026 at 6:45 AM with the headline "Raleigh has a new fire station unlike any other in the city."
