The 62-Hour Sprint: Upgrading the City of Toronto’s Most Complex Fire Alarm at Union Station
Ryan Duggan Director of Safety & Compliance, The City of Toronto
Toronto’s Union Station is Canada’s busiest multi-modal transportation hub serving 300,000+ people daily. This iconic historic site spans over 936,000 ft2 and is also home to the largest EST3 to EST4 upgrade in Canada (as of the end of 2025).
Like all EST3 owners, we received the ‘end of life’ notification letter in early 2023 and considered our options. The City of Toronto has 24 buildings with EST3 fire alarms systems, including our City Hall, Metro Hall, multiple long term care homes, community centers and Union Station. The City of Toronto required a strategy on how to tackle the looming EST3’s end of life, specifically at Union Station as the Province of Ontario, Metrolinx, is working on another major expansion which requires additional nodes and hardware. Do we maintain the status quo and have Metrolinx order EST3 hardware now or do we bite the bullet and jump into a major fire alarm project? This wasn’t going to be easy and it sure wasn’t going to be cheap.
The fire alarm system at Union Station originally began as an Edwards 6500 Custom, which was replaced with an EST3 system that has grown to 39 nodes and over 6,800 devices. This is our largest and most complex fire alarm system throughout our ~2,500 building portfolio. The City didn’t have this fire alarm replacement in the 10-year Capital plan and hadn’t allocated any funding for it, as it had lots of life left. Suddenly we’re faced with a major capital project involving multiple stakeholders and any potential solution needed to minimize disruption to the tenants and the public in the station.
The first question we had to answer, do we replace or do we upgrade? While the EST3 is under 20 years old, why not start from scratch and reset the asset life to zero and have a new system for the next 30+ years? While this sounded like a solid plan, the reality of replacing the fire alarm at Union Station came with a price tag of ~$10 million, a 2.5+ year project schedule and a significant disruption to both our tenants and the public. Upgrading the system was our only viable option.
We initially met with Chubb Fire & Security in early 2024 to flesh out the project and determine the what and the how. What components needs to be upgraded? How can we limit disruption? Do we need a permit or is this a ‘like for like’ replacement? (Paul Latreille, keep reading, I promise we got a permit!) What do we need for drawings? Will this project trigger S1001? Do we need to conduct a full VI? Who’s going to project manage this whole thing? There were a lot of unknowns and in the end, we assigned the responsibility to deliver the entire project to J.D. Collins Fire Protection, who is our existing fire protection vendor at Union Station.
In January 2025 we hosted the kick off meeting with JD Collins, Chubb, Insurance Engineering Services (IES) and a number of staff from the City’s Safety & Compliance team. We sat around the table and talked shop, how we can tackle a project of this size and scope, project staging, duration and all the other details you would expect. Additionally, we tackled a few of the big questions and confirmed that yes, we need a permit, yes this will trigger S1001 and no, we do not need to conduct a full VI, but we will roll our annual S536 inspection and a partial VI into the project as well. On the component front, we needed to swap out the main boards, CPU’s and amplifiers for the head end and all the nodes. Just as we were wrapping up the meeting, I threw a wrench into the gears and said to the team ‘Oh by the way, the entire upgrade has to occur over the Thanksgiving long weekend to limit the impact to operations.’ I’m not sure if it was shock or disbelief, but somehow, I was able to convince everyone around the table it was a good idea.
By March the stakeholders were working towards the initial design and project quote when we received an unexpected email from Chubb that almost upended the entire project. The existing network was incompatible with the EST4 requirements and will need to be replaced throughout the entire building. This wouldn’t be a big deal if you needed to connect a couple nodes 300’ apart, but the network in Union Station was 20,000’ long! This wasn’t a simple ‘whoops, we forgot a heat in the 3rd floor storage room’, this was a brick wall that increased the project cost by ~36% and moved this project from 6 figures to 7 without notice.
Can you guess how I took the news? I went through all five stages of grief in about 15 minutes. Somewhere around the second stage I vaguely remember saying ‘rip it out and we’ll put in something that doesn’t need $400,000 of special cable’. Once I came around to stage 5, acceptance, we moved forward.
To say this was an unexpected twist is an understatement. The old network consisted of 10 pair in, 10 pair out between each node. Just to be clear, our network was 20,000’ linear feet long, 10 pairs X 20,000’ = over 34 miles (54 KM) of total network cable in Union Station. Our network was a combination of FAS in EMT, VitaLink cable in EMT and surface mounted mineral insulated cable. None of it would work and it all needed to go.
The existing network was inefficient to say the least. It was built in stages and extended during renovations and expansions over the years. This resulted in the network crossing itself multiple times and long home runs across the station. Since we had to rewire the network, we took the opportunity to cut out almost 13,000’ by moving to a significantly more efficient linear class A network topography. Our new network was ‘only’ 7,000’ and consisted of a single pair of 18 gauge VitaLink 6 twist per foot (2” lay) 2-hour fire rated cable.
We opted for a 2-hour fire rated network backbone as Union Station is a Critical Infrastructure site and maintaining the fire alarm network connectivity is imperative. While this is a well reasoned approach with easy justification, it resulted in a series of installation challenges. Installing fire rated VitaLink, as per the manufactures listing can be challenging (to say the least). The type and brand of conduit, fittings, hangers, pull boxes, including the brand and type of lubricant used to pull the wire all mattered. Additionally, if the fire alarm conduit runs through a room with other conduits, it must be the highest one in the room so in the event of a fire, any failing conduit or materials do not impact the fire rated conduit. This wasn’t impossible, but it sure wasn’t easy.
The big thing that made this network cable both necessary and special was its high twist rate. This cable has 6 twists per foot, which improved noise resistance and permitted higher communication protocol speed. The old network had 10 pairs in/10 pairs out, the new network did everything on one single pair. To jam this much information down the line, it needed to operate at much higher speed and the 6 twist per foot cable was the only fire rated solution out there. Sure, we could have easily pulled fibre and hit the baud rate requirements without blinking, but CAN/ULC-S139/UL 2196 fire rated fibre doesn’t exist (yet).
As the summer came and went, we received our Building Permit, the new network was installed and megger tested and we finalized the equipment change out schedule. The 134 amplifiers to be upgraded were swapped out in advance of Thanksgiving weekend as these units are forward and backward compatible. All of the CPU’s were pre-programmed by Chubb in their rack and test facility and all of the materials were packaged and assembled by node, crated and pre-positioned at each node throughout the station to aid in a seamless change over.
At 2000hrs on Friday, October 10th, the fire alarm system at Union Station was taken offline and a fire watch went into effect. Over the next 62 hours a crack team from JD Collins and Chubb worked tirelessly to upgrade all 39 nodes and tie in the new network. At 1000hrs on Monday, October 13th the fire alarm monitoring was restored, the fire watch sent home and the largest and most complex EST3 to EST4 upgrade to date was complete! After some much needed rest and a turkey dinner, the project transitioned to conducting the S1001 and the S536 annual inspection.
While engineering challenges and big infrastructure projects are exciting, at the end of the day once the pats on the back are done, someone needs to pay the bills. Here’s the unvarnished financial overview of this project with a final cost of $1,240,820.42 w/tax and breaks out as:
This wasn’t cheap, but when you compare a $1.24 million upgrade that provides 20+ more years of asset life at our most complex building versus replacing the system for $9.4 to $10.8 million, this seems like a bargain at ~12% of the cost of a new fire alarm system.
Pushing the upgrade to be completed over a long weekend was 10% crazy and 90% genius. This limited the impact to station operations, reduced fire watch requirements and ripped the band aid off to start and finish the project as quickly as possible. While I paid the technicians some golden overtime on the long weekend, it was a bit of a wash as managing the upgrade over 2 to 3 weeks during routine hours would have chewed up nearly the same labour budget in the end.
We timed the project to so the annual S536 inspection and partial VI was included within the scope. While there was no material cost savings, this allowed us to capture the annual inspection cost within the capital project vs the operating budget.
We catalogued and the retained every single part that was removed from the EST3 system. I have 39 CPUs, main boards, loop controllers, power supplies, displays and a pallet of amplifiers. I have 23 more buildings with EST3 systems in them. With the end-of-life for EST3 upon us, I’m sitting on a gold mine of parts that I can use to maintain my other systems without having to jump into an emergency upgrade or system replacement.
We didn’t upgrade the firefighter telephones in the station. The existing firefighter phones from the EST3 system were kept in service intentionally, even though they are not listed for use with the EST4. These would normally have been replaced during an upgrade but we’re taking a different approach, we’re removing them completely. In partnership with the City’s Emergency Services, CodeNext developed an Alternate Solution Proposal justifying the use of the existing emergency service Distributed Antenna System (DAS) in lieu of the firefighter telephones. This allows for seamless wireless communication by all emergency services throughout the station and sets a new standard in first responder safety. I’ll share more on this topic another day, but this is our second property we’ve used a DAS in lieu of firefighter telephones and I will never install a firefighter telephone again…
Upgrading the fire alarm system at Union Station was the right answer. We could have kicked the can down the road and pre-purchased nodes and materials for the EST3 system and kept it running, but for how long? Within 5 years there would be another project, extension or expansion at Union Station and we would be right back to where we were in 2023 wondering how to tackle this.
I want to share my heartfelt thanks to the staff from JD Collins Fire Protection who steered the ship and ran the show, Chubb Fire & Security Canada who provided rock star technical expertise and all of the parts, Marcel Carassoulis at Insurance Engineering Services who stickhandled the codes, permits and engineering and Andrew and his team from Net Electric who installed and pulled the new network. A special thanks Robert Burns at JD Collins who’s forgotten more about the fire alarm system at Union Station than I’ll ever know. Thanks for showing up early and staying late…
Author Bio
Ryan Duggan is the Director of Safety & Compliance for The City of Toronto. Ryan published the City's first Master Fire Program, which identifies roles & responsibilities for fire and life safety compliance in 65 million square feet of City owned buildings, spaces and critical infrastructure. Ryan is a graduate from the Fire Protection Engineering Technology program at Seneca Polytechnic and lives in Dundas, Ontario.
Share this article!