Fire hydrant maintenance
Oct. 20th, 2017 10:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elizillaA red city pickup has pulled up in the street out front and stopped. It has a yellow device mounted on the trailer hitch, that looks like the top of a fire hydrant. A guy jumped out and hooked up a big yellow hose between his trailer hitch and an actual fire hydrant. Another similar red truck with a similar hydrant thing on the hitch, pulled up and a much bigger guy jumped out and gave a karate kick to the wrench the first guy had put on the hydrant. Water gushed forth from the trailer hitch at a rate that turned the street into a roaring stream bed. The big guy in the second truck left.
Bicyclists kept going by, carefully riding through the roaring torrent. They probably wished they had fenders.
The guy from the first truck watched the water flow for about five minutes, then turned it off. He disconnected the hose, then attached some kind of portable pump to the hydrant, and pumped out some more water. I guess the actual tap is down below the frost line and they pump out this bit to empty the portion that is susceptible to freezing.
Looks like the trailer hitch thing lets them route the water over the grass and into the street. The weight of the truck is important there too. One guy couldn't hold a hose to direct it so neatly, even if it was the big karate kicking guy from truck #2.
I suppose they will spend all day doing this to every hydrant in town. Maybe more than a day - there are a lot of hydrants and I don't know if these are the only two trucks or if there are more. They probably pick the day carefully, to do it when the storm drains are not under any load from actual weather, and after it cools off enough that people have stopped watering their lawns so they have the water tower plenty full.
Trivial I know, but I find it interesting to keep track of what's going on out there.
Bicyclists kept going by, carefully riding through the roaring torrent. They probably wished they had fenders.
The guy from the first truck watched the water flow for about five minutes, then turned it off. He disconnected the hose, then attached some kind of portable pump to the hydrant, and pumped out some more water. I guess the actual tap is down below the frost line and they pump out this bit to empty the portion that is susceptible to freezing.
Looks like the trailer hitch thing lets them route the water over the grass and into the street. The weight of the truck is important there too. One guy couldn't hold a hose to direct it so neatly, even if it was the big karate kicking guy from truck #2.
I suppose they will spend all day doing this to every hydrant in town. Maybe more than a day - there are a lot of hydrants and I don't know if these are the only two trucks or if there are more. They probably pick the day carefully, to do it when the storm drains are not under any load from actual weather, and after it cools off enough that people have stopped watering their lawns so they have the water tower plenty full.
Trivial I know, but I find it interesting to keep track of what's going on out there.
