A crowd of neighbors visited Dallas Fire Station 41 Thursday morning for a re-opening ceremony after the place was wrecked in the 2019 tornado.
Another famous 41, former Dallas Mavericks star Dirk Nowitzki was one of the neighbors.
He said he is glad to have the full base of Dallas Fire Rescue protection back in his neighborhood.
"This is obviously a state-of-the-art facility so I’m excited to be here today," Nowitzki said.
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On October 19, 2019, an EF-3 tornado hit Station 41.
Firefighters were inside that station when the tornado struck.
"They said, yes we are safe but the station is gone," Dallas Fire Rescue Chief Dominique Artis said.
Ladder truck 41 was stuck in the wreckage for days as firefighters went through the neighborhood searching for survivors in the long path of destruction.
The outbreak of nine tornadoes that caused an estimated $1.5 billion in damage, made it one of the costliest storms to ever affect North Texas.
"To have such a devastating tornado that ripped from one side of our city to the other but we didn’t lose a single person that night," Artis said.
It has taken more than four years to reopen the rebuilt station and some other North Dallas damage also remain.
"There’s been a lot of progress from 2019. Sometimes people forget we had a global pandemic in the middle of all that after the tornado," Dallas City Council Member Gay Donnell Willis said. "There are still some things that are working their way through the system, some are private, some related to the city."
A big slab near the reopened station marks the spot close to Preston Road and Royal Lane where another large structure has not yet been rebuilt.
At the intersection of Midway Road at Killion, Willis said supplies have arrived to replace temporary traffic signals which have been used since the tornado.
At that corner, the former Walnut Hill Elementary School has been replaced with a new leadership academy.
The fire station 41 had years of delays in city contracts. A temporary station was used by firefighters during that time on Royal Lane near the Dallas North Tollway as rebuilding was underway.
"It’s really devastating but we can always go back to the fact that we didn’t lose a life in all that," Willis said.
Chief Artis said the new fire station has the latest technology and safety equipment.
There are spacious quarters for firefighters who spend a third of their lives at the station. It has a decontamination area to clean firefighting gear. And it has a sturdy tornado-safe room to protect people in the future, as they were protected from the 2019 tornado.
"This fire department is here to stay and the men and women are trained well for the emergencies that come upon us," Chief Artis said.
The new station actually opened on Jan. 31 but Thursday was the time for neighbors and media people to see it.
