Nearly 10 Percent Of Hydrants Don't Work, Union Says
D.C. Firefighters Performing New Round of Inspections

By Allison Klein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 18, 2007

A stepped-up inspection of D.C. fire hydrants is finding that nearly 10 percent don't work, fire union officials said yesterday.

Firefighters doing the testing said they think that more than 900 hydrants across the city are not in working order, posing a significant public safety risk.

The D.C. Water and Sewer Authority has greatly underestimated the severity of the problem, union leaders and other D.C. officials said. WASA, which is responsible for maintaining the city's 9,000 hydrants, has said it believes that less than 1 percent of them are out of service.

"Clearly, WASA has a much larger problem than what they realized," said Dan Dugan, president of the D.C. Firefighters Association.

The fire department's most recent round of tests began after a fire April 30 at the Georgetown public library. The two hydrants closest to the scene didn't work, and firefighters had to use other hydrants about two blocks away.

The tests from a sampling of hydrants across the city -- conducted May 7 through Tuesday -- found that 23 of 256 didn't work. The problems were found in neighborhoods across the city.

Those findings are consistent with more wide-scale testing that the fire department completed on its own initiative late last year. Of 1,072 hydrants tested, about 11 percent were not working. Fire officials said the testing was done out of concern that WASA wasn't acting quickly enough to test the hydrants and correct problems.

Even more disturbing, Dugan and other firefighters said, is that emergency workers often don't know that a hydrant is broken until they try to use it. "It slows down the operation," he said. "In our business, seconds count."

WASA officials continued yesterday to dispute the extent of the problem. They said they have already repaired some of the hydrants identified in the inspections. According to a list of broken hydrants that WASA distributes each week, just 38 hydrants across the District were not functional as of Monday.

"I can only talk about the ones we know to be out of service," said WASA General Manager Jerry N. Johnson. "When it's reported to us, we go out and check them."

Dugan and other firefighters also raised questions about how well WASA keeps track of hydrants. Firefighters last year discovered that about 125 hydrants that were not on WASA's automated mapping system.

Johnson said those hydrants could be on private property and not WASA's responsibility.

"It's a work in progress," Johnson said of the mapping system. "It would not surprise me if there may be some that are not in there. Others are on private property."

WASA is working with the fire department to test all of the city's hydrants and identify the ones that need to be fixed. The testing started last year, but it was put on a faster track after the Georgetown fire. No one was hurt in the blaze.

Testing the hydrants is a time-consuming task, which firefighters have been doing between emergency calls. Large swaths of the city have not been checked.

D.C. Fire Chief Dennis L. Rubin said firefighters could deal with the situation better if they knew which hydrants were out; some are tagged, but others, yet to be discovered, are not.

Rubin said that in Atlanta, where he was fire chief until earlier this year, about 10 to 20 percent of the hydrants are generally out of service, but he contended that did not cause problems. He said the number matters less than knowing which ones work and which ones don't.

"When we don't know which ones are working, it's kind of like playing Russian roulette," Rubin said. "The biggest issue is when we're completely blindsided."

Johnson said last week that all the testing would be completed by the end of the summer, but fire officials said a more realistic goal is late November.

WASA has agreed to fix hydrants within five days of learning they are broken, and the agency's $26.5 million project calls for fixing and upgrading hydrants to meet national standards. About 3,500 will be replaced in the next five years as the city phases out old ones, some dating from the 1920s.

"It is a very serious matter, not something we would want to understate or play down," Johnson said. "That's why we asked the board to approve $26 million."

The problems once again put WASA under public scrutiny over safety issues. High lead levels in D.C. drinking water posed a potential health hazard from late 2001 to 2004, and WASA was criticized for failing to quickly alert the public. The agency later agreed to replace all lead pipes in the city.

Johnson is the only person to serve as WASA's general manager, having overseen the quasi-independent agency since 1997.

D.C. Council member Phil Mendelson (D-At Large), head of the public safety and judiciary committee, has called a hearing for Wednesday to discuss the city's response to the Georgetown blaze and other high-profile fires. He also plans to discuss hydrants, he said yesterday.

"It's outrageous," Mendelson said. "There should not be 10 percent of fire hydrants out of service, nor should there be any confusion about what the correct number is."

In neighboring counties with newer infrastructure, there are few problems. The Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission maintains about 40,000 hydrants in Prince George's County and more than 20,000 in Montgomery County. Of those, about a dozen in various locations were out of commission on a recent day, and repairs were imminent, officials said.

In Baltimore and Baltimore County, where there are about 22,000 hydrants, 91 are out of service, according to Kurt Kocher, a spokesman for the Baltimore Public Works Department, which also oversees hydrants in the county. The fire departments in the city and county conduct quarterly tests to maintain them, Kocher said.

In the District, WASA said it tests hydrants every other year. But D.C. firefighters said that the testing actually has been happening every three years and that the department wants it done annually.

On city streets, there is a fire hydrant on almost every block.

In the Bloomingdale neighborhood, at Flagler Place and V Street NW, a lime-green hydrant had a collar yesterday that read "Maintenance Required," to the dismay of Maxine Sumner-Clark, who lives a half-block away. She said several vacant homes in the area have caught fire in recent years, and there is a construction site across from the hydrant -- even more reason, she said, to have a fully functioning fire hydrant on the corner.

"If it doesn't work, it concerns me," Sumner-Clark said. "Big time."

Staff writer Candace Rondeaux contributed to this report.