When firefighters respond to blazes in some communities across Ohio, they can simply look at a fire hydrant's color or check a map to find out how much water will be available.
Officials in cities including Akron, Columbus, and Cincinnati said firefighters have a responsibility to know what kind of water will be available at the scene of a blaze.
Last week in Toledo, Fire Chief Mike Wolever said firefighters could not stop flames from consuming a Westmoreland home because the water volume was insufficient to fight what had become a hot, attic fire.
Firefighters at the scene did not know they had only a smaller, 4-inch water line to draw from.
But throughout Ohio, because of the importance of both water volume and pressure, many communities have established systems that enable firefighters to know quickly the quality of the water flow they will be getting from a particular hydrant.
For more than 20 years, fire crews in Akron have known the number of gallons per minute to expect from a hydrant based on the color of the hydrant's dome. In that city, red, orange, green, and white-domed fire hydrants dispense 500, 501 to 1,000, 1,001 to 1,500, and more than 1,500 gallons of water per minute, respectively.
More than half of Akron's fire hydrants - those that are white-domed - are the most powerful. All of the city's hydrants are checked at least once a year.
Nevertheless, 58 of Akron's 12,000 hydrants are hooked up to smaller 4-inch water lines, said Gregg Loesch, a distribution engineer at Akron's public utility department.
"We attempt to replace these 4-inch mains as project areas and availability of money allow us," he said, adding that the smallest pipes the city currently installs are 6 inches in diameter.
In Columbus, fire officials have been trying to get the city's fire hydrants color-coded for years without success.
"We've been thinking about color-coding fire hydrants in terms of flow so [firefighters] can tell right off the top [what they are dealing with]," said Darin Gibson, a civil engineer associate with the Columbus Water Department. "But there is a public perception problem with that."
He explained that if the city were to color-code its fire hydrants, Columbus officials fear that residents with low-flow hydrants in their neighborhood or in front of their homes would want to know why they are the ones near low-flow hydrants.
Because fire hydrants in Columbus are not color-coded, fire chiefs often consult water atlases - paper charts that outline the city's water-main system - before heading out to the scene of a fire, said Tom Paige, the hydrant liaison at the Columbus fire department.
"It's not in our protocol, but a lot of times the chiefs might look at [a water atlas] to see what hydrants are on larger mains," he said.
Fire chiefs in Columbus won't have to rely on paper schematics for much longer, as the city's fire department is in the process of outfitting all of its fire engines with laptop computers so that crews will be able to see the size of the waterlines available at the scene of a blaze.
Farther south in Cincinnati, firefighters know that city's hydrants like the backs of their hands - each of Cincinnati's engine companies keeps a detailed log of the flow rate and pressure in every fire hydrant in the area for which they are responsible, said Fire Chief Thomas Thomas. He added that every company updates the information annually.
Moreover, Cincinnati's fire hydrants have "black bonnets" - the cap of the hydrant - if the static pressure in the hydrant is greater than 100 pounds per square inch. This gives firefighters yet another piece of information about the hydrant.
Unlike Akron, Columbus, and Cincinnati, Toledo lacks a comprehensive system to give firefighters information about the kind of water available from the city's fire hydrants.
When Barbie and Herman Harrison's home burned to the ground last week in Toledo's Westmoreland neighborhood, it took firefighters almost an hour to find a fire hydrant that would have provided them with adequate water.
Contact Florence Dethy at:
fdethy@theblade.com
or 419-724-6064.
First Published June 19, 2009, 11:42 a.m.