Arian Collins, the water department spokesman who gave me the rundown yesterday about how the city ended up losing 3.8 million gallons of water from a toppled fire hydrant, e-mailed me today with a bit more information.
I am privy to more information about the incident of the knocked over fire hydrant on Wednesday night than I was when we spoke yesterday.
When I arrived at the scene at about 6:30/6:45 p.m., I asked the supervisor then in charge what the situation was. He told me they were having difficulty shutting down the service line to the hydrant because the gates were damaged.
What I didn’t know until this morning is that the car that struck the hydrant sat on top of the gates for more than two hours before it could be moved. Because of this, the crew could not access the gates to shut off the hydrant. By the time I arrived on the scene, the car had been removed and towed away, and I didn’t know that it had impeded the shutoff process.
This was a very unfortunate incident from the hydrant being knocked over in the first place, to the problems with the gates. Fortunately, we are normally able to shut down a hydrant service line much more quickly.