A Thousand Broken Hydrants

By Tom Bridge
July 6th, 2007 @ 5:41 PM Uncategorized

Fire Hydrant

Originally uploaded by Oh So Koooky.

With just 2500 fire hydrants left to test, DC’s Fire Chief Dennis Rubin says 14% of DC’s fire hydrants just don’t work. 14% of the 7,000 they’ve tested would be just under a thousand broken fire hydrants. Good God, folks. That’s insane.

That’s 1 in 7 hydrants out of service. Count seven fire hydrants near your house, and 1 of them won’t work, and when the fire department shows up to put out the house fire, you’re pretty much boned.

C’mon, WASA, get it together!

2 Comments so far

  1. Max (unregistered) on July 6th, 2007 @ 6:06 pm

    Uh, yeah!

    http://dc.metblogs.com/archives/2007/05/got_water_2.phtml


  2. Carl Weaver (unregistered) on July 7th, 2007 @ 9:20 am

    My recommendation is to not have a fire.

    This is a disgrace. Things break now and then and that is to be expected, but this is horrible. The really bad part is that they don’t know which are working and which aren’t. You’d think they might document this as they are decommissioned, or perhaps even remove the dead hydrants.

    Yearly tests should be required for this type of thing, or else at some reasonable interval.



Terms of use | Privacy Policy | Content: Creative Commons | Site and Design © 2009 | Metroblogging ® and Metblogs ® are registered trademarks of Bode Media, Inc.