Siting a Fire Station by Leveraging Soft Constraints and Supporting Science

Gaining acceptance for the location of a new fire station depends on more than the minimization-of-response-time data. In this case, the technical solution took a back seat to political, interpersonal, and perception-based issues. Fourteen years ago I became a firefighter to learn how those issues affect the acceptance of a new location and, in the process, developed a fire-station-siting method that is still used today by the City and County of Denver. I did this work while I was a student in Gene Woolsey's operations research guild at the Colorado School of Mines.