Firefighters needed so much water to battle a huge grain elevator blaze that they had to ask the whole town to go without — even canceling school to conserve the water supply, officials said.
The cause of the fire isn’t yet known; a fire marshal began an investigation. It took firefighters responding from 17 communities about eight hours to extinguish the blaze in the town of about 2,200 people, which was reported about 11 p.m. Sunday, said Hawley City Administrator Lonnie Neuner. No injuries were reported.
Firefighters even used water from the local golf course because the town’s water tower couldn’t keep up, Neuner said. Their ladder hoses each use about 600 gallons a minute, about as much as Hawley’s system can pump, Neuner said. He expected the city would allow water usage to resume “pretty soon.”
I’m surprised this made some sort of news article about it. It isn’t too horribly uncommon. Had it happen here when a factory caught fire in a small town. We almost sucked two towns dry of water and were spread out to a third city. Took like 12 hours to get out. Just one ladder truck can flow over 1,000 gallons a minute from its ladder tip. Most fire apparatus are built with pumps capable of flowing 1,500 gallons a minute.
You get a town with a 500,000 gallon tower and you have a couple ladders flowing and a couple engines flowing, you can run it out in a couple hours, depending on how fast they can pump water back up into it.
I work in 911 dispatch, something like this hasn’t happened in my county while I’ve been working here, but we do have at least one interesting water situation that I’m aware of
We border a major city, but the far end of our county is fairly rural, I still consider it to be suburban but just barely, go much further and you start hearing banjo music.
The fire departments in the city are of course heavily focused on urban firefighting and rely on hydrants pretty heavily because they’re all over the place.
Once in a while though, they get a big fire in less built-up places where they don’t have adequate hydrants, the one that comes to mind was in a large rail yard towards the outskirts of the city.
So they end up needing to call in for mutual aid from us and other surrounding counties to send in pump trucks and such that can pull from a nearby river or what have you, and our more rural areas do that all the time because we have a ton of rivers and streams that run through our area and hydrants can get a little sparse in areas, so we sometimes end up sending them an hour or so down to the city to help with a fire.
They also have, what a lot of them call artificial ponds, though I suspect they have a more official technical term, which is sort of like a portable swimming pool they’ll sometimes set up at the fire when there’s no other convenient water source. They’ll dump a truck load of water into it then send the truck to go refill wherever they’re able to, often with a few trucks making rounds doing this.
Tangentially related, the town I grew up in once upon a time had a lot of factories and mills. One of the biggest factories had a house just a short ways up the hill from it that had a large swimming pool, I believe the house belonged to the owner’s son in law or something. Apparently that swimming pool was rigged up to work as a backup water supply for the factory’s sprinkle system.
That factory was long closed and converted into offices by the time I was born, and that swimming pool was no more. It’s one of those things that’s only been passed on by word of mouth by people who used to work in that factory like my dad, so it is possibly apocryphal.
Yep. City departments don’t know how to draft water. They just use hydrants. The portable ponds are called drop tanks. Typically, one will hold about 3,000 gallons of water.