Buda Fire Department is near completion on their fourth fire station

BUDA — The Buda Fire Department (BFD) has been providing service to its residents for almost 70 years and has continued to grow alongside the city.

Although there is evidence of the fire department existing when Buda was founded, the official documented date of origin is 1956. Chief Clay Huckaby initially began in 1993 as a volunteer for BFD — as did everyone else who responded to fires. Those who chose to spend their free time would respond to calls from their house at all hours of the night and spent hours baking treats, barbecuing and frying catfish to afford gas for the fire trucks.

After receiving an influx of calls that could no longer be fulfilled with strictly volunteers, four paid employees were hired to work a standard 8 a.m.-5 p.m. shift in 2004. From then, Huckaby became the first paid chief.

“I thought I would work in Austin or run a business or something, you know. That’s what I thought I would do as a career, but I just had always volunteered as a firefighter to help the community because I was born and raised in Buda,” said Huckaby. “Then, this opportunity came along and since 2004, I’ve been fire chief.”

Huckaby has seen the fire department grow over the years, beginning with strictly volunteers, to the first group of paid employees and now 54 employees — all to keep up with the expanding city of Buda. To meet the demand, the department is opening a new fire station located off of FM 2770.

“It’s going to be our new headquarters … and it’s been about five years in the making. We basically designed a fire station that was a facility that would house up to 12 people, 24 hours a day as well as bring all our administrative staff under one roof. We have fire marshals, fire inspectors, community health paramedics and training staff, but we’re kind of scattered all over the district. This will allow us to all be under one roof and provide better service to our community and also our personnel out there,” Huckaby said. “There’s a large training facility there for our staff to be able to incorporate new training in-house. That’s indoors and outdoors, so we can do medical training inside in a classroom style setting and then go outside and do live fire training evaluations outside as well.”

The new station will help reduce response times as it’s located in the center of the district.

“Our current response time is about five minutes and 34 seconds and the national average is eight minutes, so we’re pretty proud that we’re below the national average. But in a critical situation for medical calls, it’s a matter of life or death and seconds count,” said Huckaby.

Despite construction on the new station nearing completion, a fourth station is already in the works due to $3 million allocated by Hays County, provided by the American Rescue Plan Act, as well as $2 million from the Hays County Emergency Service District.

“As fast as we’re building this new main station, we are also now working on station number four, which will serve the east side of our district in the Shadow Creek subdivision. We receive a lot of calls in the eastern portion of our district and our response times seem to be a little higher out there just because of the distance. So, we’re about 75% done with the design development,” said Huckaby.

BFD will continue to expand to provide more resources to the community.

“The growth has been substantial … We’re a growing district; it’s not getting any smaller. Our ultimate goal is just to continue to add and train personnel to the best of our abilities and add stations to bring the best service to the community,” said Huckaby.