Boing Boing on the elimination of poles in firehouses:

"The pole is something we associated with as kids," says Scott Wolf, a partner at the architectural firm Miller Hull, which designed Seattle's Lake City station that opened in June and another station set to open in the Greenwood neighborhood in 2011. "But the pole has been one of the biggest sources of firefighter injury."

"New fire stations are mostly single-story," Boing Boing says, or they "contain multiple staircases, or, in some cases, slides."