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Bad day on the engine - food for thought (and a chance to chime in...)
Ever have one of those days where absolutely nothing goes right? Where even the boss on the rig is scratching his head in disbelief? That was my Wednesday this week. And I feel I should share it with you all - maybe one day you'll be desperate enough to try something like this, and it just might work.
My department is situated on a rural/urban/suburban interface. To the north we have a decent sized city, to the west is farm country, and east & south are suburban. All of this not too far from NYC. I mention this because water supply tactics change depending on where we're going. On this particular occasion, we were going mutual aid to a town to the west - FarmVille, if you will.
Our assignment was to establish a water supply for the tanker (or tender, for you left-coast boys) shuttle by drafting out of a stream. The dry hydrant at the location was unusable. And, as we discovered when we tried to draft, our primer was unusable too. This presented a big problem. Our booster tank was down to about a quarter of a tank after trying the dry hydrant, no primer, and tankers on the way. To boot, because it was "only a fill site," the lieutenant decided to bring all the rookies on this one, so our crew consisted of the LT, chauffeur (who I trained with), and 3 jakes. So now what?
IF YOU WERE THE CHAUFFEUR, WHAT WOULD YOUR NEXT MOVE BE?
What we ended up doing worked, but I wanted to get some outside thoughts on what others would do when the proverbial feces strikes the oscillating device. Thanks for your thoughts and be safe!
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Vic Silverfish on
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panic!
:-)
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Permalink Reply by WhiteLightning on
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Because we are 90 percent rural, our WaterMaster tankers also carry floating strainers and each has 45 ft of 6 in hard suction. If we can get within 90 ft of the water, we can supply it otherwise we shuttle from the next nearest source.
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Permalink Reply by Daniel J. Graham on
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Vic: When in trouble, when in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout. Not very productive, but entertaining at the least.
Lightning: That's all fine and great, but how would that work without a primer to pull a draft?
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Permalink Reply by Rob Vest on
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Never tried it but could try this. Put booster line in the water source end of a hard suction and pump thru it possibly acting like a jet siphon. Don't know if it would work but what do you have to lose other than what little water you have.
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Permalink Reply by Walter Karl Powitzky, Jr. on
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Sometimes you can draft using boosters/brush trucks depending on how they are set up.
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Permalink Reply by Paul Spencer on
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The problem is not that the primer is burned up... the problem is that you need water in your pump and hard suction in order to draft. Connect hard suctions and strainers...
1) Have the rookies hold the hard suction open end in the air at the level of the bottom of your water tank on the engine. Open tank-to-pump until water flows out of hard suction and close tank-to-pump. Quickly drop the hose into water source. Engage pump and fill your tank back up.
2) If you have enough water in your tank you can back flow the water down the hard suction and often catch a prime.
3) If no water in your tank, like in example #1, rookies holding hose in air, pull the strainer from hose, bucket water into the hose like a bucket birgade until the pump is full (open tan fill valve). Then reattach strainer, drop hose, engage pump and away you go.
Lots more ways but that should get you headed in the right direction.
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Thanks for all the great answers guys. Some very interesting ideas out there that I'm looking forward to trying out.
What we ended up doing was connecting the second length of hard suction hose and putting a low-level strainer on the end of it. Our low-level strainers (usually used for portable pond operations) all have venturi connections on them. This way we can move water from one portable pond to another.
Anyway, we used what little water we had to flow out an 1 3/4" line connected to the venturi on the strainer, which was in the water source with a probie on top. Once we had a decent amount of water in the hard suction, we closed the tank-to-pump valve, and opened the monitor on the truck. It cavitated for a very brief second, then lo and behold, we had vacuum on the intake, and 100 pounds PDP. We shut the 1 3/4" down and cracked the tank fill til we were full.
I'm not sure about holding the hard sleeve in the air... if the pump takes in air it may cavitate, and without immediate action the pump may be damaged.
Thanks again for all the great ideas guys. We will be doing a drill on this in a few weeks, and I intend to make use of some of your points.
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That was a great fix for your problem. You must have a steamer valve at the pump panel for the hard suction. Did you have the air bleeder open on the steamer valve and did that purge the air in the hard suction before you opened the steamer valve? I'm going to have to try that, thanks!
The waky "outside-of-the-box" priming methods I was describing is with the fire pump not even in gear or the impeller spinning. No chance of cavitating if it's not spinning.
One last note is there is a big difference between the needle bouncing from air moving through the pump for any of a thousand reasons and cavitation. When drafting air in the water is an ever present problem and doesn't directly damage the pump. Overworking the pump pulling very hard on a water source from elevation gain or too small a hose or pipe are what cause cavitaion and pump damage.
I teach really agressive pump engineering skills so take me with a grain of salt. I have also been a full on fire mechanic for close to 20 years so cavitation is something I am very familiar with.
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Permalink Reply by Roy Walker on
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In our area all our tankers and most pumpers carry at least one portable pump so we'd just set up some portables until one of the four or five pumpers usually parkesd at the scene with nothing to do redeploys to the site to relieve us.
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Permalink Reply by Moose on
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This was what I was going to say as well Roy, we keep a portable pump, 4" suction hose, strainers and gas on our engine/tanker for back-up reasons and for when we cant get the truck close enough to the water source. This pump gets like 300GPM's and can fill a tanker fast enough. Not as fast as a truck would but it gets the job done.
Paul- Excellent advice sir! I have never heard of that technique and wished I had heard about it months ago! We had issues getting water at a creek once with our engine/tanker and this would probably have worked. Thanks for the advice and this is why I am a member here at the nation!
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You and me both brother. One more for ya... That portable pump you have in the creek with the probie running the hose out for a tanker... You can prime the fire engine with the water if you connect the portable pump hose to the small 2.5" suction on the engine. Open the steamer port with the hard suction connected to it and the water will flood the pump and flush down backwards filling the hard suction. Open the deck gun slowly and burp out the air. The 30 seconds of hurky jerky burping air is not cavitation it is just the impeller passing the air out the discharge. It's easiest out the deck gun but you can burp it into the engines tank also if the pipe is big enough. Have fun trying options.
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