Member for Redlands Peter Dowling and long-time advocate for the station, Mick Meehan, met at the Gordon Road site next to the ambulance station to inspect plans and the beginnings of construction.

"It's great to see work finally start, but I'll be even more relieved when I see the fire truck in the driveway," Mr Dowling said.

"By any estimation of the sheer size of the area the existing Capalaba and Cleveland stations have to cover, this station was desperately needed.

"Now when the truck from two stations is responding to a call, it leaves at least one other free to respond in a triangulation of coverage."

As a former fire officer and analyst of data on response times and coverage patterns, Mr Meehan said many southern Redland residents could not have received under-14-minute response times that should have been guaranteed by paying their fire levies.

"Ten years late but finally here, we have all survived by just pure luck that we have not been dealt with a disaster or tragedy of lives lost," Mr Meehan said.

"All the stations here, including this new one, will have one truck and 16 staff, four people working to a shift, which means they can be at the furthest part of their response area and need to cover twice the distance to get to an incident," Mr Meehan said.

"I started to work for the building of this station in 1999 when the need was already very obvious, but the project stalled when I became ill in 2001 and was forced to retire.

"In 2003 I started lobbying again, and the then Minister Pat Purcell listened and guaranteed the station in 2006. The project has still been a long time coming with many delays. I'm now just hoping the government won't try to close the other fire stations as they earlier planned to do."

After first being promised in 2000, the proposed station was dropped by the State Government then re-announced in the 2007-08 Budget, he said.