Taking a closer look at how fire hydrants maintained across Connecticut

The faulty hydrants after a recent fire in Waterbury are raising questions about how they’re maintained and what the guidelines are.

“It was horrific, because I was sleeping and I was woken out of my sleep,” Michele Philips, a neighbor, said.

It was a scary situation for her, seeing her neighbor’s home on fire on Bennett Street early Tuesday morning, and it was even more frightening when she saw the firefighters struggling to get a nearby hydrant to work.

“No water came out of it at all,” she said.

City officials say multiple hydrants had water flow issues before firefighters found one that was working properly on a different street farther away. That caused a 20-minute delay and is leading to concerns in the community.

“If that happened to us, what would have happened to my own house, and say if the fire had spread,” Philips said.

Waterbury Mayor Paul Pernerewski said the issue likely stemmed from debris stuck in pipes more than 100 years old.

“We have very old pipes underground that eventually build up residue inside that slows the flow,” he said.

“Hydrants have about a 100-year lifespan. So there are a lot of hydrants, especially in your big four cities in Connecticut that are old,” Fire Chief Dan Coughlin with the New Haven Fire Department said.

Coughlin explained that hydrant maintenance varies by location, with no state law requiring a specific number of checks on public hydrants.

 “It’s based on their needs, their manpower, for example, as well. So it’s different,” he said.

Coughlin said that in New Haven, hydrants are checked twice a year…and they work with their regional water authority for pressure testing.

“We flush them, we make sure we have good flow coming out of them. We don’t put a gauge on it to see the exact number that we’re getting out of there,” Coughlin said.

The National Fire Protection Association recommends hydrant flow tests every five years. Pernerewski said that he wants to go above that standard. Right now, city workers flush all hydrants every year, but he says they’ll also focus on water pressure testing after realizing that it hadn’t been done for over a decade.

“We’ll now have two folks who can go out and do the testing as well, and we can test while we’re flushing,” he said.

Along with water pressure testing, the mayor said he’s working with the fire department to bring back a color code indicating the pressure at each hydrant.

“Anything 1,500 gallons a minute or higher was painted blue. Green was for those between 1,000 and 1,500, and then red was for those 700 or less,” Pernerewski said.

Philips hopes these changes will mean they’ll have working hydrants.

“We’re talking about people’s lives, and you want to feel good,” she said.