Ok so i would like to hear some stories about some of the dumb things you have seen done around a hydrant that blocked access to it. The worst for me so far happened in February 2008. The call came in somewhere around 0300 hours for a structure fire at a local hotel. When I left the house to go to the station I found 3-4 inches of snow on top of a layer of ice. Perfect weather! And it was still snowing. The closest hydrant was in an area where the owners had decided to do some lanscaping and brought the dirt all the way up to the middle of the steamer cap. Then snow and ice on top. Made it real fun to dig out all the while being yelled at over the radio for water! So thats my horror story whats yours?
P.S.- Everyone has seen the picture of the BMW with the hose through it...Has anyone ever had to do that personally?
We have only got like 9 Hydrants in our area and only 3 of them are worth using. The Water Company does not consider them Fire Hydrant's they call them Flush Devices.. I wish I could say I've got to run a supply line thur the windows of a BMW..LOL
I've never gotten to break windows on a car to run a supply line through but we did throw one over the trunk of a vehicle once which left a real nice dent all the way across. I dont know if this counts but its kinda funny... we recently had a structure fire and our two new probies decided it was their job to "man" the hydrant all night by standing by it for the entire time we were on scene, about five hours total. I guess you could say they were blocking the hydrant. Pretty much they were just useless.
Even that would be pretty fun to do. If you got to stick around to see the look on the guys face when he comes back to find his car all messed up. Why would they want to man the hydrant? I guess they haven't been bitten by the bug. That would be like punishment for me to have to stay at the hydrant for the whole fire!
You wouldn't want to do that in Tucumcari. The "lake" that we have is so nasty that you wouldn't want that stuff in your pumps. I am not sure of how many hydrants are in town. There are a bunch but it seems like they are never close enough.
We had a working structure fire about a year ago, needed to drop a line to the hydrant, hydrant was blocked. What to do? One of the captains had a hydrant wrench and was ready to go to town on the window, about this time. Before all this started, or before we got there, the neighbor had hooked a rope to the van, as he was getting ready to pull it out of the way, we arrived on scene. So he got the van out of the way, we did a quick knockdown with one tank, second in dropped a line to the first, and put the fire out.