No water

Photos by Clarence Tabb Jr. / The Detroit News The fire hydrant outside the station at Gratiot and Houston Whittier is inoperable. So many of Detroit’s 30,400 fireplugs are broken that the department this year ran out of yellow tags designed to alert crews that their main weapon against fires is unavailable.

Many hydrants in Detroit haven’t worked in years

Crews lose valuable time fighting blazes searching for water

By Melvin Claxton and Charles Hurt / The Detroit News

ngine 55 raced to 6739 Montrose on Sept. 7 after neighbors reported the one-story house on fire. By the time the crew arrived, flames had engulfed the back of the small bungalow.     The engine’s driver dropped off the crew at the house with hoses and sped to the nearest fire hydrant at the end of the block, got out and quickly hooked up the pumper. Back at the house, firefighters waited with their hoses for water.
    The water never came. The hydrant was broken.
    It is a problem Detroit firefighters encounter with unnerving frequency. Hundreds of the city’s hydrants — a firefighter’s primary source of water for battling blazes — are broken. Some have been out of service for years.
    The frustrated driver of Engine 55 unhooked the hose, got back in the pumper and headed down the street to the next hydrant. He got out and again hooked up his pumper.
    Nothing. The second hydrant didn’t work either.
    Back at the house, firefighters — their hoses dry — were powerless to stop the raging flames. It wasn’t until a second pumper arrived minutes later and hooked into a third hydrant that the firefighters got water; but by then, the house was gutted.
    Last year, the city recorded that 2,000 of its 30,400 hydrants were out of service. But the numbers on broken hydrants may be deceptively low because the city only conducts limited inspections.
    Firefighters do visual checks only, and rarely turn hydrants on to see if they work. Detroit’s Water Department, which is responsible for repairing fire hydrants, inspected only 440 fireplugs during the 12 months that ended June 30. In that same period, the Water Department reported it fixed 867 inoperable hydrants.

Firefighters check a hydrant on Lawrence near 14th Street. Fire hydrants that don’t work are common throughout Detroit.

    Complicating matters, fire crews often don’t know which hydrants will provide water when they need it.
    Firefighters experienced that just two weeks ago. The crew of Engine 32 — dispatched to a blaze at 729 Tennessee on Oct. 23 — was in an even more desperate situation. All three hydrants on the block didn’t work.
    Firefighters had to stretch their hoses to a hydrant on the next block to get water. It took them 2 hours and 26 minutes to contain the blaze in the vacant house.
    The fire was rekindled five times the following day by arsonists, Fire Department records show. Each time, firefighters had to get water from a block away.
    There were no injuries in either fire. But that’s not always the case when hydrants fail in Detroit.
    A broken hydrant hampered firefighters’ attempts to rescue residents of the Pallister Plaissance Apartments on April 1. Four people died in that fire and more than a dozen others were injured, including a 7-year-old girl who was left paralyzed.

Hundreds remain broken
    The fires at Montrose and at Tennessee highlight the danger when hydrants don’t work. It is a danger Fire Commissioner Charles Wilson said can’t be ignored.
    “You have to be able to put water to a fire,” said Wilson, a major general in the U.S. Army Reserve and former police deputy chief. “That’s like bullets to a gun. If I can’t get bullets to my personnel, I have an issue.”
    Wilson said he has appointed a firefighter to work with the Water Department to ensure that hydrants are fixed. He says he gets weekly reports on hydrant repairs.
    Yet hundreds of hydrants remain broken for extended periods.
    Firefighters who inspect hydrants listed more than 267 throughout the city as being out of service in April. That was the last full month hydrants were inspected because the department doesn’t check them during the summer when it doesn’t have to worry about broken fireplugs freezing.
    Of the broken hydrants, records show that 183 had not worked in at least two months. Some hadn’t worked in years.
    Among them: a hydrant at Lincoln and Viaduct, which was hit by a car in 1996 and badly damaged.
    For the past four years, the Fire Department has repeatedly reported that hydrant broken to the city Water Department, according to Fire Department records. It never has been replaced or fixed.
    There have even been times when hydrants for entire sections of Detroit were out of service for extended periods.
    Several hydrants at Clark and 4th Street — an area with several warehouses and light manufacturing plants — have been repeatedly listed as out of service by firefighters, department records show. A Fire Department listing showing the Clark Street hydrants as broken, simply notes: “all hydrants bad.”
    Sometimes the broken hydrants are impossible for the Fire Department to miss.
    The Belle Isle communications station, the nerve center of the city police and fire departments’ radio transmissions, has a broken fire hydrant. In April, Fire Department records show the hydrant had been reported broken at least six times.
    Some broken hydrants with yellow out-of-service rings are even left unrepaired for months in front of firehouses. That was the case with the fireplug outside the fire station that housed Ladder 7, the busted aerial that couldn’t rescue residents in the April 1 fatal Pallister Plaissance Apartments fire.

Visual inspections only
    The Fire Department hasn’t turned on hydrants to determine if they work since 1981. Firefighters say they stopped these flow tests on all fireplugs because they were too time-consuming.
    Now firefighters must wait until faced with emergencies to find out if hydrants function. And they have frequently found that hydrants in apparently perfect condition don’t always operate.
    Part of the blame lies with a decaying hydrant system that dates back to the first two decades of the 1900s, and a Water Department that’s slow to fix problems.
    The scope of the hydrant problem was driven home earlier this year when the Water Department ran out of the yellow “out of service” tags used to mark broken hydrants. Entries in log books at several firehouses noted that the Water Department didn’t have any more tags.
    On Feb. 2, firefighters at Engine 17 noted in their logs that they couldn’t tag four of the hydrants they listed as out of service because they didn’t have the yellow rings. One of the hydrants had been reported broken five times and the others three, records show.
    A log book entry made by firefighter Alfonso Martinez highlights the frustration felt deep in the department’s ranks.
    “The above hydrants are not tagged with yellow (out of service) rings, due to water dept. refusual (sic) of giving me any yellow rings to tag defective hydrants,” Martinez noted.


Contact the reporters at churt@detnews.com and mclaxton@detnews.com.