Fire Hydrant Roulette
Union Claims 200 of 1,200 May Be Dead

BY THOMAS K. STAFF THE SCRANTON TIMES

There may be just as many or more hydrants out of service that we dont know about, said Mike Ferke, head of the union that represents the men who use the citys 1,200 hydrants.

Dead hydrants in the city is not a new issue, but each time there is a major fire and a hydrant does not function, a controversy erupts.

Firefighter Tom Noll said it took him between 30 to 45 minutes to find a working hydrant early Thursday morning when a fire devoured four houses in the 300 block of North Garfield Avenue.

Fire Chief Harvey Applegate said that delay meant little to the firefighting effort.

We already had water on the fire by that time, Chief Applegate said. We were already connected to three other hydrants.

Mr. Ferke disagrees.

If we had more water, we could have limited damage to two of the houses, he said.

Less than three weeks earlier, a home on North Washington Avenue was gutted. Again, firefighters found a broken hydrant.

Each time there is a dead hydrant at a fire, Chief Applegate says it had little impact on efforts to put out the blaze.

Every hydrant is important, Chief Applegate concedes, but there are sufficient hydrants in the city that firefighters can hook up to when they find one not working.

There is a delay in getting water on a burning building when a hydrant is found to be out of service, but Chief Applegate said firefighters can use the 750 gallons of water on a truck to begin fighting a fire until a working hydrant is found.

At the request of The Scranton Times, Chief Applegate was preparing a list of all the nonworking hydrants.

Each fire station has a bulletin board with a list of hydrants out of service but Chief Applegate said it is not always accurate.

Some of the hydrants are more than 100 years old and must be replaced if they break because the city can no longer get parts to fix them, he said.

But it doesnt matter how old a hydrant is if it is connected to an old water main.

A working hydrant, no matter its age, can only deliver 500 gallons of water a minute if it is connected to a four- or six-inch main. On an eight-inch main, the hydrant can deliver 1,000 to 1,500 gallons a minute.

And even though there is an adequate supply of new hydrants on hand, Chief Applegate said the city is at the mercy of the Pennsylvania-American Water Co. to install them.

It is difficult to be certain if a hydrant is working without actually putting it into service, he said.

Contractors sometimes hook up to hydrants without getting PAWC permission and they sometimes break the units, he said.

Other times hydrants are hit by cars and snow plows and although they do not appear to be damaged on the outside, something inside can be broken, he said.

In both cases the Fire Department is unaware of the problem until it tries to use the hydrant.

If a hydrant is leaking, he said, the water company will shut it off.

In the Fire Departments view, a leaky hydrant is not necessarily a bad thing.

Then we know there is water to it, Chief Applegate said.

But to the water company, a leaky hydrant costs money.

I wish that they were all working but we are always going to have some that are out of service, Chief Applegate said.

The city has one fire hydrant inspector, Ed Joyce, but a recent one-year delay in filling that position left a list of broken hydrants that needed to be fixed, Chief Applegate said.

Not long ago the city had two firefighters assigned to fix hydrants, but one of the jobs was eliminated to save money.

Mr. Ferke said one man cannot do the job. If a hydrant has to be pulled out of the ground, the inspector has to get help from a nearby fire company, he said.

Repeated attempts to contact Mr. Joyce on Friday night were unsuccessful.

There are several ways to help firefighters get water onto a blaze without first experiencing hydrant difficulty, Mr. Ferke said.

The city could create a data base of working hydrants and provide it to the Lackawanna County Communications Center, he said. When there is a fire, dispatchers could inform responding companies which hydrants to hook up to.

The city could also color code each hydrant to indicate how much water each hydrant can deliver, he said.

Another step to be taken, he said, is to tag each meter that is not working.

Mr. Applegate said he has obtained the material needed to make the tags and the citys sign painter is working on them.