Fannin County Fire Chief Larry Thomas met with representatives from Blue Ridge, McCaysville, Morganton and the Fannin County Water Authority to discuss fire hydrants Wednesday, July 8.
“We’re all in this together,” Thomas said. “Everybody in this room needs to pull together as one team. Even though we’re different water authorities and a fire department, we still need to be on the same page as each other. Communication is a plus.”
The City of Blue Ridge currently has their hydrants on a GIS mapping system with specific numbers for each hydrant. The city shared the system with the fire department and offered to share their tracking method and documentation process with the other cities.
“We are assigning numbers to our hydrants for tracking and maintenance purposes,” Rebecca Harkins, Blue Ridge’s utility director said. “We should have that completed by the end of the year. We’ve got a little over 500 fire hydrants in our system. So it will take us a while to do that. That way, your volunteer guy or whoever’s out there, they know whose hydrant that is.”
According to Harkins, some hydrants in new developments are not currently listed on the system at this time, but will be in the future.
Thomas asked that any new hydrants added to any water departments system be reported to the fire department as soon as possible.
The fire department’s goal is to have as many hydrants in service as possible by the time the Insurance Services Office (ISO) comes back to re-evaluate the county’s fire protection rating in November.
The department’s three crews are checking hydrants in between emergency calls. According to Thomas, they are less than 100 hydrants away from having the check completed for this year.
The group also discussed potential options for making hydrants more visible and identifiable to firefighters during an emergency. One option included painting a blue square on the road in front of each hydrant. No official decision was made regarding a marker, however uniformity among the municipalities was agreed upon.
Blue Ridge Mayor Donna Whitener also offered to do more than required in order to help bring the ISO rating back down.
“We’re all ultimately trying to provide the same thing, which is safety and trying to keep everybody’s rates down,” she said.
Fannin Board of Commissioners Chairman Stan Helton thanked those in attendance for agreeing to get together to discuss the hydrants stating, “I just appreciate everybody showing up and grabbing a piece of the pie on this, because it’s a pie that we all share.”
The group agreed to meet again, at least once, before ISO’s inspection in order to re-evaluate the hydrant situation and ensure as many were in service as possible.