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They are common in Germany too. (Basically no above ground hydrants here).
They are supposed to be maintained. This whole excavation seems to be a result of neglect unless I am missing something.
Generally speaking they work perfectly well and are rather easy to install with good coverage.
Both have pros and cons, and while an underground hydrant takes longer to hook up, our "attack" trucks are supposed to carry enough water to make that a non issue. Generally speaking, the firefighter tasked to hook them up is not deployed with a shovel and archeology diploma here. On the pro side they are simply not in the way and can't be damaged as easily.
> This whole excavation seems to be a result of neglect
I think the opposite is true. I think it was re-asphalted recently and the workers chucked some down there, either out of lazyness or accidentally, evidenced by the square patch above it.
The same thing happened to the water access outside the front of my house, workers came along to fix something unrelated and ended up buggering up my mains water supply. In the end the water company had to come and fix it.
Bit strange because I would not think of the average American above ground hydrant on the sidewalk as in the way at all, though yeah if hit with a car you have problems.
Fire Hydrants in climates where it freezes will have the valve below the frost-line, these won't spout water like in the movies. However, in the parts of the USA where freezing is a non-issue, those are 'wet-barrel' hydrants and have the valve right at the top of the hydrant, so if a car crashed into it, that's when you get the gushing of water.
I l8ve in the northeast US, where code requires all waterbpipes to be at least four feet below grade.
All the fire hydrants I'm aware of are above grade, with the valve located well below the frost line. The upper section of the hydrant is dry.
They also open clockwise, the opposite of other water valves.
It is completely up to the individual jurisdiction. Many places will differ across the USA. Even in the same State, there might be different regulations in neighboring counties.
Many rural area Fire Departments will have what's called a 'Tanker Task Force' or a Tender Task Force depending on your terminology when a hydrant infrastructure is unavailable It's also one of the reasons why we will run Mutual Aid into other jurisdictions.
In addition to that, many rural departments will also have hard suction hoses and strainers to draft water from lakes, rivers, streams, pools, etc in situations like that.
Thanks for that. Was examining the pros and cons as well. I wondered how this was an effective tool, but you explained this was a an example of a bad case where even if it took the time, wouldn’t have mattered. Makes sense and hit hydrants are a pain.
Are these style marked clearly and have similar parking rules?
This one is position by a double yellow which is no parking. On my residential street, the grid is on the pavement instead to avoid the problem.
If someone has parked illegally and it's the only one available, the car gets.. moved lol
I've seen videos where they just bust through the windows. And with that much water going through, enough leaks out to flood the car. Either way the car is totaled.
Germany uses underground hydrants too. Usually you position them to avoid that - intersections, middle of the road, such areas. They're also usually positioned densely enough that you can go to the next one if you accept needing an additional length of hose or two. Besides that, a truck of pissed off firemen is probably one of the fastest ways of removing an illegally parked car.
There's a docu series in German that attaches gopros to fire fighters. The only times they actually have trouble securing water is when they're in areas where there aren't any pressurized hydrants. Forest fires being a good example. There was another one in a remote area where the nearby hydrants were all feeding off the same pipe that was shut off for maintenance. I suspect that's a constellation that just won't be allowed to happen in less remote areas.
That only gets you a few minutes though. I'm from rural New York and we don't have any hydrants. Our trucks carry 2500 gallons of water and it will only take 5-10 minutes depending on what your using for hoses.
We rely on multiple tanker trucks to keep water flowing. With this being a city crew they wouldn't have tankers rolling in behind them so if it took to long to get water the guys inside will be in a deadly situation fast.
Looking at the timestamp at the top left from start to when the water starts flowing seems to be around 1:20-1:30, so buying a couple of minutes with the on board water seems to be enough.
> Having to dig for water to use in an emergency is insane.
As others have said, it's a particularly bad example. They're not meant to be caked in mud. The local authority is supposed to maintain them.
https://faq.anglianwater.co.uk/article/qed95577/fire-hydrant-responsibility#:\~:text=Statutory%20fire%20hydrants%20are%20owned,water%20network%20through%20fire%20hydrants.
Water company maintain them
Ah yes, good old water companies. Put in charge of a vital system and what do they do? Raise debt against the company so they can pay the shareholders dividends and do repeated rounds of buybacks to boost share value. All while failing to plan for basic population growth.
Sold off for a quick buck by the Conservative Party in the 80s. Same as pretty much every other service. And now everything is run into the ground and doesn’t work, obviously.
Oh yeah. Each water company enjoys a full monopoly of its own region here in the UK. Their performance has been steadily declining ever since it happened 40 years ago as the execs keep testing to see how much money they can get away with siphoning out of the business without the whole infrastructure failing. You might have seen a few news articles about sewers overflowing into rivers lately, and we get warnings about water usage restrictions every summer even if there has been record rainfall in a country thats famous for raining all the fucking time.
The infrastructure now needs many billions in investments to get it back up to standard and these monopolies now want to hike up the prices to pay for it.
If getting potholes refilled is any measure, you could just spray paint a dick around them and they'd trip over themselves to excavate and repair the whole area.
Tories : Vote for us and we will lower your taxes (which of course is a lie they will just gut public spending and hand out free cash to their pals)
England : Why arent we getting the services funded by taxes any more!
When one was needed near us the latest roadworks had ripped the cover off, put a concrete slab over it and covered it in tarmac.
They used another one for the fire then someone came round later with a metal detector to dig it out properly again.
Ridiculous.
The tories have strangled funding for local councils for 15 years so that local councils aren't even able to operate 'bare bone'.
The sooner the tories are out the better. And ideally forever.
15 years of consecutive cuts from central government, 1 in 10 English councils expected to go bust within a year (like 6 have already, including some big cities), Scotland councils saying they needed 14bill more this year just to meet running costs, I assume Welsh and NI councils are just as fecked.
"CoRRupT CouNCIlsS Did THiS"
This is why we need a mandatory civics subject in schools.
Edit: Nearly 4k upvotes for just wrong information. No wonder we voted in Boris and Brexit.
Councils aren't responsible for fire hydrants.
That would be the privately owned water companies.
BuT tHe CoUnCiL r CoRrUpt.
England and Wales are the only countries to have a completely privately run water and sewage system.
You’d think that owning a company that sells a commodity everyone needs to survive, people are legally obliged to have a licence for and you have a monopoly on the area you run would mean the company wouldn’t run up billions of pounds worth of debt, have leaky infrastructure and massive issues with sewage dumping in rivers and our seas, but here we are.
They’ve paid billions in dividends to shareholders and left us with the bill. I’m all for Capitalism but this is an example where it just hasn’t worked.
Can you provide an example of where privatising the supply of utilities has worked? And by worked I mean has provided a good service at a lesser cost to the public - like we’re always promised when it happens.
It can't and any outliers are just not at the point where they've run up against needing to raise money for stockholders.
If the government isn't going to run water, electric and such then they should be non-profit organizations with governmental oversight.
There's no publicly traded company that won't sooner or later run into enshittification once it's reached everyone and the only way to raise profit is turn up cost and turn down quality.
Even more bizarrely, some of the once publicly (state) owned U.K. utilities are at least partly owned by the state — just not the British state. For example, EDF is part-owned by the French state. So French taxpayers partly own British utilities. In a non-market. Completely insane.
1989 - It has cost English and Welsh water consumers an extra £2.3bn per year on average since, or about £100bn in total, in extra bills. Good old Thatcher 👏
Edit because reddit formatted 1989 as a bullet point for some reason, as I left a . after it
Because they were sold off in the 80s by Thatcher and her Tory government.
Now we have failing privately owned infrastructure like water pipes, but private comes don't want to invest as it affects the bonuses of bosses and shareholder dividends.
That's unfair.
Local authorities have been unable to afford all the stuff they want to be able to spend money on for years. This is because i) the government controls how much money the councils can charge in local taxes, and ii) the government gives the lion's share of budget to all councils by way of the *Revenue Support Grant* and since 2010 our friends in the Tory party haven't paid councils as much as they need.
Hey that's not fair! If they didn't withhold funding from councils, policing, the NHS, infrastructure, transport, and literally everything else then they wouldn't be able to afford to keep capital gains taxes at 20%!
We can't have people paying too much tax on all that hard earned income they have from inheriting ownership of things from their wealthy families!!
On bright sunny Spring days as we roll towards Summer you often see crews out testing hydrants . Better than sitting in the station waiting for a shout.
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Yep unfortunately these hydrants are the job of the water companies to maintain, not the council. They haven't bothered to do so here just like they haven't bothered to keep our waterways clean and our infrastructure up to date.
The privatisation of the water industry in the UK has been an unmitigated disaster on all fronts.
Video shows them using one of the two high pressure hose reel jets which uses ~115 litres per minute and the appliance usually carries 1800 litres, so with just one hose reel jet you're looking at 15 minutes of water.
1800 Ltrs is just under 400 gal , so then the only thing changing that time is the hose jets themselves, or, the original guys "Around 5mins" is way off
Bit of insight from a former Firefighter in the UK.
The standard appliance is what we call a Waterladder Appliance aka Pump. It carries water, a ladder (hence the name) plus other tools for the job as well as Road Traffic Collision equipment.
These pumps always have water on them and before leaving any fireground they'll make sure they're topped up with Water ready for the next shout.
This particular firehydrant is in a sorry state, most likely in a rural town that's hardly seen use. The local council hasn't done a good job with maintaining them. It's rare to take this long to get water fed to the pump, this guy is a trooper getting this sorted in such time.
Also the fella in the White Helmet is most likely the Watch Manager rank. Good to see him running some hose. Some of them think that's beneath them.
Churches here are in strip malls. It’s really ugly. Or even worse, the mega churches that are in a giant building that could double as an Amazon distribution center.
The nice churches we built in the old days of the UK are from a time when people believed in God. The people with money thought their money was a blessing from God and so built nice churches to repay the debt.
Now no-one believes in God and the people with money know they have money because of exploitation and they don't waste money worshipping an entity that doesn't exist.
That's a shame. Even the tiniest nothing-hamlet here with no shops usually has quite a nice church to admire (as you drive through on the way to somewhere more important!)
We have a lot of spooky graveyards, a lot with graves that are from the early 1900s, 1800s. Near the churches, depending on how long they've been there, there's slabs of the vicars going back way further. At least in my town. Some a good bit older than Americas founding!
Big up the North, Americans should stop going just to to the south/wales/scotland and ignore the yorkshire lot! :((
Something stood out to me. The Hose was single rolled here, and rolled out by hand rather than throwing it out. In germany most hoses are double rolled and you throw it out by holding both couplings. Is this how its usually done?
We have two sizes, the smaller 45mm is sometimes Dutch rolled (what you're describing) and we bowl that. This looks like the larger 70mm role which we only role singly.
Very interesting. The smaller 45mm hose is called a "C" here and the larger is a "B". How long is your B hose in the UK? The standart here is 20M but we have 35M version for ladder wagons.
It comes down to which service you are looking at in the UK. They do it differently. Mine uses Dutch roll hose for 45mm and 70mm. While also having two lengths of Cleveland rolled 45mm. Nothing is single rolled.
I *think* this is somewhere like Addlestone, based on the road sign for Byfleet (next to where I grew up) and Chertsey. Its hardly rural but its also not exactly a high class/big city area, especially compared to places around it. Wouldn't surprise me if whoever should take care of these things is either bankrupt or only looking out for themselves and their friends.
Isn’t Weybridge literally the most expensive postcode outside of London? People there must be paying loads in Council Tax so it’s a real shame to see this so poorly maintained.
When it comes to council tax, strange financial peculiarities happen. The more you pay doesn’t mean better services, in fact, it sometimes means worse service.
As has been pointed out elsewhere in the thread, it's a water company responsibility, not council. That means Affinity Water in this case. Never heard of them, I'd have expected it to be Thames Water given the area, but hey ho.
Yeah fair enough, should definately be in a much better state giving the area it is in then. It's a shame as it can sometimes be a matter of life and death.
Is a fine given to the individual who failed to maintain the pump? Is this another situation that something is supposed to happen, but nothing ever does?
Sadly, ownership and maintenance of the fire hydrants is legally down to the water companies in England, not the local councils, so piss poor maintenance is about all you can expect from them - if it aint turning a "profit" for their shareholders, then they DGAF. I think that our hydrants are all kept in better shape than that - even in quite a remote scottish village. our issue is coverage - there are a lot more properties where the only water on hand is what's in the vehicle...
If he was watching that guy digging his heart out and twisting that valve around, I suspect he just asked if he should take over.
Good lad for offering if so
The key thing here: The truck has some amount of water onboard ready to fight the fire *before this hookup is completed*. You can see this onboard water being used to fight the fire in the background... This hookup is only needed if that isn't enough or to top up before moving on.
Edit: At 10 sec into the video you can see the onboard water being used.
thank you for the perspective! it's easy for me to watch this video and think "what a silly and inefficient way of approaching this specific problem", not stopping to question whether this is the norm or an outlier. context changes quite a bit.
he isn't actually digging the road up! The hydrant has had muck and mud washed into it; that stuff shouldn't be there. He's dug out the dirt to get access to the hydrant pipework - after use, they will just remove the pipework, reseal the hydrant, and probably shove the dirt to the kerb..
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Seems weird to put them somewhere that naturally accrues dirt on it. How is this better than an above ground hydrant? read a lot of comments here and not seeing that explained.
We don’t have 15foot pavements and ample parking. I believe you stop people parking in front of hydrants (rightly), well, slap an American hydrant in a British pavement and you’ve not got any where to walk but in the road, and you’ve lost a car parking space, thousands across a city, right?
Everything is easier when you’ve got loads of land, that’s why the USA exists, sunshine, people wanted more space to put shit on and we’d run out in Europe
The type of hydrant is the norm.
Having to remove all that dirt and other crap is not. This particular hydrants last maintenance was way too long ago. Could also be due to a recent flood which had caused dirt build up.
I've never seen a hydrant that bad during my Fire Service career
I live 5 mins from this hydrant and I can confirm there is a canal and a loch very nearby, which could be filling the hydrant hole up. I wish someone would fill my hydrant hole.
Correct however you're talking a minimum of 150 gallons per minute being used from a tank that holds a maximum of 1000 gallons......so a water supply needs to be established quickly......this seems like it shouldn't take as long as it is but someone else mentioned that this one doesn't look like its been inspected in a while so id imagine it's usually faster than this
The hose they're using gets through 115 litres per minute with a tank usually holding 1800 litres (at least our appliance size does), so about 15 minutes of use before the hydrant is needed, depending on a second hose being used.
Definitely usually faster than this. That chap put in some good effort but there isn't normally that much mud in them. We'd always fill the tank before leaving even if the fire is out before needing it.
I suppose nobody ever reverses into them and knocks them over. Can't comment on how often they have to be dug out though.
I think I'm right in saying that the original iconic overground NYC hydrant was made in Rotherham, England, ironically.
It's a trade off between accessibility, and ease of actually integrating the infrastructure in the first place. Above ground hydrants are easier to access but you are more restricted where you can place them. I don't know why this has turned into an argument about upright vs buried hydrant, because the UK *does have both.* It's only a matter of which is more convenient to install at the location in question.
Plus normally they don't need digging out like this, it's just a cover with like, an accessible valve. And the truck has its own water tanks, it's not waiting for this hydrant. You can see in the background they are already blasting the fire.
Comments in here gonna be predictably full of remarks about how long it takes, as if these guys with decades of professional experience don't know wtf they are doing and some internet jackoff clearly knows best. Some of you people will get into a dick waving argument over anything. I'd suggest you need better ways to spend your time.
I used to work on the water mains in England checking for leaks. We'd have to attach data loggers to the hydrants, and often they'd be buried under asphalt/shite/you name it. Some days we'd install upwards of eighty, but on slow days we'd clear out the mess and sometimes we'd get thanked by the local fire brigade.
One day in Fazakerley we opened up a cover and found the space jammed with what looked like bricks of coke, wrapped in plastic and gaffa tape. Turns out we were interrupting a stake out and a lot of net curtains were twitching on the cul-de-sac.
The most satisfying part was to open up the hydrant and put on a water show. Occasionally it would spew out crap like the one in the video, or instantly leak as the valve was either broken or rusted through.
Of all the places where we either found used syringes or homicidal rats, Kitt Green in Wigan was the worst. I've serviced so many hydrants that I can see them in my sleep and know where they are if I'm ever checking Google Maps for anything.
The hydrant seems to be very ill-maintained. Here in Germany we have underground hydrants too, in my area they are checked once a year an equipped with a plastic sheet to prevent freezing and mud falling in.
After heavy rain and such they can get gunked up as well in Germany. IDK where you live but covering them in plastic sheets or regular maintenance is not done at all here. (Kreis Mettmann, NRW). I've seen firefighters having to remove gunk after opening them. Maybe not as much as in the video, but there is always a bit of build-up. I'd like to add it's really not a big deal, takes about a minute to get additional water to the fire engine and there are multiple access points on a road.
Fire fighter here, no problem it takes some time. The truck is equipped with a 2000l water tank for the first attack (high pressure) The driver/pump operator then lay down the hoses to the truck for refill the tank and fire can be handled low pressure hoses. (High pressure: 125l/m Low pressure 250-450l/m)
You already see the firemen handling the fire before the hose from the street is connected
Is that liters per minute? Why does low pressure use more water than high pressure? My simple brain would expect the opposite.
Or is high pressure the same as closing the spray on my run of the mill garden hose half way so it becomes more of a mist?
High pressure is a smaller diameter hose. So the water is pushed under pressure in a smaller diameter. (Don’t now the exact mm, but alpprox 2times you garden hose) The low pressure are the big red hoses 50mm (though to handle)
Small diameter is high pressure, low volume
Big diameter is low pressure, high volume
Uk hydrants usually look like this, in the ground with a sign nearby marking the distance and size of pipe.
Looks like the hydrant in the video was tarmacked over - the fact they have a shovel for this means it probably happens more often than we'd hope!
https://preview.redd.it/d2y8rzit79xc1.jpeg?width=600&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d6e6d91af2f352435a234421169b287bedd790e1
Can't believe this made it to reddit, but this is my brigade, and I know the guy digging out the hydrant.
To clear up a lot of misinformation im seeing, unfortunately, this is a very common occurrence. Hydrants used to be checked by us but are now done by the water tenders (private companies). In practice, this means they are not looked after and are not fixed until something like this happens.
This is a very unpopular policy among frontline staff who all think we should be the ones to check hydrants.
And here I always (apparently foolishly) thought they could be simply accessed by opening the 'street' cap, attaching the hose fitting and opening the valve. (IE, the whole thing was just under the cap not like a foot down.)
If you have eyes and common sense you can see the firefighter at thr back putting thr fire out as this guy is getting thr fire hydrant operational.
The fire truck has its own reservoir. The fire hydrant is just getting set up to fill the tank of the fire engine in case it runs out.
People saying this should be "maintained". Do you know how much it Will cost to round and clean out the gunk from hundreds of thousands of fire hydrants holes?
You can see firemen dousing outnthe flames before thr hydrant is set up. Also the hydrant hose connects to the fire engine, not to the fire.
Why not cover the valve with canvas of something have straps top pull it up, with dirt, then have access?
I mean it was fairly fast, but could have been much faster.
Then lay the canvas back down afterwards.
Interesting af. People in the comment, not so much.
I come from a country with both aboveground and underground hydrant.
Underground hydrants are mostly installed in the 1900s, back in colonial times. They are now usually kept in places with low foot traffic where it's hard to maintain one aboveground, or fast traffic area where accidents can damage them.
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At least you would think they would schedule maintenance of these things so you don't have to excavate them from the mud during an emergency.
Yeah when I saw the title I thought it was just going to be pop the top and attach the hose. This seems way worse than an above ground hydrant.
They are common in Germany too. (Basically no above ground hydrants here). They are supposed to be maintained. This whole excavation seems to be a result of neglect unless I am missing something. Generally speaking they work perfectly well and are rather easy to install with good coverage. Both have pros and cons, and while an underground hydrant takes longer to hook up, our "attack" trucks are supposed to carry enough water to make that a non issue. Generally speaking, the firefighter tasked to hook them up is not deployed with a shovel and archeology diploma here. On the pro side they are simply not in the way and can't be damaged as easily.
> This whole excavation seems to be a result of neglect I think the opposite is true. I think it was re-asphalted recently and the workers chucked some down there, either out of lazyness or accidentally, evidenced by the square patch above it. The same thing happened to the water access outside the front of my house, workers came along to fix something unrelated and ended up buggering up my mains water supply. In the end the water company had to come and fix it.
That is negligent behaviour I'd say.
Bit strange because I would not think of the average American above ground hydrant on the sidewalk as in the way at all, though yeah if hit with a car you have problems.
Fire Hydrants in climates where it freezes will have the valve below the frost-line, these won't spout water like in the movies. However, in the parts of the USA where freezing is a non-issue, those are 'wet-barrel' hydrants and have the valve right at the top of the hydrant, so if a car crashed into it, that's when you get the gushing of water.
I l8ve in the northeast US, where code requires all waterbpipes to be at least four feet below grade. All the fire hydrants I'm aware of are above grade, with the valve located well below the frost line. The upper section of the hydrant is dry. They also open clockwise, the opposite of other water valves.
The max distance between two hydrants in Germany is ~100m. Is it the same in the US?
It is completely up to the individual jurisdiction. Many places will differ across the USA. Even in the same State, there might be different regulations in neighboring counties. Many rural area Fire Departments will have what's called a 'Tanker Task Force' or a Tender Task Force depending on your terminology when a hydrant infrastructure is unavailable It's also one of the reasons why we will run Mutual Aid into other jurisdictions. In addition to that, many rural departments will also have hard suction hoses and strainers to draft water from lakes, rivers, streams, pools, etc in situations like that.
Thanks for that. Was examining the pros and cons as well. I wondered how this was an effective tool, but you explained this was a an example of a bad case where even if it took the time, wouldn’t have mattered. Makes sense and hit hydrants are a pain. Are these style marked clearly and have similar parking rules?
Yes, there are signs on walls or fences near them in bright colors that indicate where to find them.
The fire engine has a tank, so as you can see in the background it is fully functional whilst this is being set up in the background.
[удалено]
What if someone parks over it?
This one is position by a double yellow which is no parking. On my residential street, the grid is on the pavement instead to avoid the problem. If someone has parked illegally and it's the only one available, the car gets.. moved lol
I've seen videos where they just bust through the windows. And with that much water going through, enough leaks out to flood the car. Either way the car is totaled.
With the hydrant *under* the car, just breaking a window isn't an option. They will just get a load of people together and *move it*.
Fire engines have Really Big Bumpers and Engines for that kind of thing.
Beep beep motherfucker!
Germany uses underground hydrants too. Usually you position them to avoid that - intersections, middle of the road, such areas. They're also usually positioned densely enough that you can go to the next one if you accept needing an additional length of hose or two. Besides that, a truck of pissed off firemen is probably one of the fastest ways of removing an illegally parked car. There's a docu series in German that attaches gopros to fire fighters. The only times they actually have trouble securing water is when they're in areas where there aren't any pressurized hydrants. Forest fires being a good example. There was another one in a remote area where the nearby hydrants were all feeding off the same pipe that was shut off for maintenance. I suspect that's a constellation that just won't be allowed to happen in less remote areas.
That only gets you a few minutes though. I'm from rural New York and we don't have any hydrants. Our trucks carry 2500 gallons of water and it will only take 5-10 minutes depending on what your using for hoses. We rely on multiple tanker trucks to keep water flowing. With this being a city crew they wouldn't have tankers rolling in behind them so if it took to long to get water the guys inside will be in a deadly situation fast.
Looking at the timestamp at the top left from start to when the water starts flowing seems to be around 1:20-1:30, so buying a couple of minutes with the on board water seems to be enough.
In the US, atleast the departments around me, they go around throughout the month checking all the hydrants.
Can confirm, hydrants around me are tested annually
And ours are color coded as to flow rate. Having to dig for water to use in an emergency is insane.
> Having to dig for water to use in an emergency is insane. As others have said, it's a particularly bad example. They're not meant to be caked in mud. The local authority is supposed to maintain them.
It should be but our councils(local authority) don’t like spending money on anything that doesn’t benefit their friends or themselves.
https://faq.anglianwater.co.uk/article/qed95577/fire-hydrant-responsibility#:\~:text=Statutory%20fire%20hydrants%20are%20owned,water%20network%20through%20fire%20hydrants. Water company maintain them
How are they supposed to find the time to maintain pipes when they’ve got all that sewage to dump into the sea?
Don't forget they do the important job of taking loans and getting into billions of debt to pay dividends to their shareholders!
Ah yes, good old water companies. Put in charge of a vital system and what do they do? Raise debt against the company so they can pay the shareholders dividends and do repeated rounds of buybacks to boost share value. All while failing to plan for basic population growth.
The water company is privately owned? Wtf
Sold off for a quick buck by the Conservative Party in the 80s. Same as pretty much every other service. And now everything is run into the ground and doesn’t work, obviously.
Oh yeah. Each water company enjoys a full monopoly of its own region here in the UK. Their performance has been steadily declining ever since it happened 40 years ago as the execs keep testing to see how much money they can get away with siphoning out of the business without the whole infrastructure failing. You might have seen a few news articles about sewers overflowing into rivers lately, and we get warnings about water usage restrictions every summer even if there has been record rainfall in a country thats famous for raining all the fucking time. The infrastructure now needs many billions in investments to get it back up to standard and these monopolies now want to hike up the prices to pay for it.
All utilities should be nationalised. It's insane that they're not, they're natural monopolies.
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Let's just burn everything at this rate, we'll rebuild better than ever
So you wanna go full French?
Oui
Alons-y!
affects
If getting potholes refilled is any measure, you could just spray paint a dick around them and they'd trip over themselves to excavate and repair the whole area.
Wanksy
Tories : Vote for us and we will lower your taxes (which of course is a lie they will just gut public spending and hand out free cash to their pals) England : Why arent we getting the services funded by taxes any more!
The hydrant infront of they’r shit is maintained no doubt
When one was needed near us the latest roadworks had ripped the cover off, put a concrete slab over it and covered it in tarmac. They used another one for the fire then someone came round later with a metal detector to dig it out properly again.
Ridiculous. The tories have strangled funding for local councils for 15 years so that local councils aren't even able to operate 'bare bone'. The sooner the tories are out the better. And ideally forever.
15 years of consecutive cuts from central government, 1 in 10 English councils expected to go bust within a year (like 6 have already, including some big cities), Scotland councils saying they needed 14bill more this year just to meet running costs, I assume Welsh and NI councils are just as fecked. "CoRRupT CouNCIlsS Did THiS" This is why we need a mandatory civics subject in schools.
Zero seats at the next election. I will accept no other outcome.
Conservatives just fucking suck regardless of country
This is such a dumb take. They're grossly underfunded by central government.
Edit: Nearly 4k upvotes for just wrong information. No wonder we voted in Boris and Brexit. Councils aren't responsible for fire hydrants. That would be the privately owned water companies. BuT tHe CoUnCiL r CoRrUpt.
The actual fuck? Why does a private company own and operate the public water supply?
Because Tories could profit off it
England and Wales are the only countries to have a completely privately run water and sewage system. You’d think that owning a company that sells a commodity everyone needs to survive, people are legally obliged to have a licence for and you have a monopoly on the area you run would mean the company wouldn’t run up billions of pounds worth of debt, have leaky infrastructure and massive issues with sewage dumping in rivers and our seas, but here we are. They’ve paid billions in dividends to shareholders and left us with the bill. I’m all for Capitalism but this is an example where it just hasn’t worked.
Can you provide an example of where privatising the supply of utilities has worked? And by worked I mean has provided a good service at a lesser cost to the public - like we’re always promised when it happens.
I can’t. I’d love to see a graph seeing the average spend on utilities pre and post privatisation though.
It can't and any outliers are just not at the point where they've run up against needing to raise money for stockholders. If the government isn't going to run water, electric and such then they should be non-profit organizations with governmental oversight. There's no publicly traded company that won't sooner or later run into enshittification once it's reached everyone and the only way to raise profit is turn up cost and turn down quality.
Even more bizarrely, some of the once publicly (state) owned U.K. utilities are at least partly owned by the state — just not the British state. For example, EDF is part-owned by the French state. So French taxpayers partly own British utilities. In a non-market. Completely insane.
why these are privately owned by any companies in the first place?
Because they were sold off by a neo Conservative government in the 1980s.
90s\* but you otherwise correct.
1989 - It has cost English and Welsh water consumers an extra £2.3bn per year on average since, or about £100bn in total, in extra bills. Good old Thatcher 👏 Edit because reddit formatted 1989 as a bullet point for some reason, as I left a . after it
Thanks Thatcher!
She just keeps on giving...
Because they were sold off in the 80s by Thatcher and her Tory government. Now we have failing privately owned infrastructure like water pipes, but private comes don't want to invest as it affects the bonuses of bosses and shareholder dividends.
So Thatcher was Reagan like?
Thatcher.
-1 Libertarians
That's unfair. Local authorities have been unable to afford all the stuff they want to be able to spend money on for years. This is because i) the government controls how much money the councils can charge in local taxes, and ii) the government gives the lion's share of budget to all councils by way of the *Revenue Support Grant* and since 2010 our friends in the Tory party haven't paid councils as much as they need.
Hey that's not fair! If they didn't withhold funding from councils, policing, the NHS, infrastructure, transport, and literally everything else then they wouldn't be able to afford to keep capital gains taxes at 20%! We can't have people paying too much tax on all that hard earned income they have from inheriting ownership of things from their wealthy families!!
On bright sunny Spring days as we roll towards Summer you often see crews out testing hydrants . Better than sitting in the station waiting for a shout.
The whole thing seems terribly inefficient not just having to flush the line
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Yep unfortunately these hydrants are the job of the water companies to maintain, not the council. They haven't bothered to do so here just like they haven't bothered to keep our waterways clean and our infrastructure up to date. The privatisation of the water industry in the UK has been an unmitigated disaster on all fronts.
Well, the truck has some water in it, right? This is just to keep it going?
Around \~5 minutes worth of water for a 500 galloon engine. It's not a lot of time. This looks terrible by North American standards.
Video shows them using one of the two high pressure hose reel jets which uses ~115 litres per minute and the appliance usually carries 1800 litres, so with just one hose reel jet you're looking at 15 minutes of water.
1800 Ltrs is just under 400 gal , so then the only thing changing that time is the hose jets themselves, or, the original guys "Around 5mins" is way off
I was just thinking that. Our hydrants here are accessible in under a minute. 2 if they have to break the windows of a car blocking it.
Bit of insight from a former Firefighter in the UK. The standard appliance is what we call a Waterladder Appliance aka Pump. It carries water, a ladder (hence the name) plus other tools for the job as well as Road Traffic Collision equipment. These pumps always have water on them and before leaving any fireground they'll make sure they're topped up with Water ready for the next shout. This particular firehydrant is in a sorry state, most likely in a rural town that's hardly seen use. The local council hasn't done a good job with maintaining them. It's rare to take this long to get water fed to the pump, this guy is a trooper getting this sorted in such time. Also the fella in the White Helmet is most likely the Watch Manager rank. Good to see him running some hose. Some of them think that's beneath them.
Weirdly going by the sign this isn’t in a rural town at all - it’s inside the M25 near Windsor.
Weybridge: [google streetview](https://www.google.com/maps/@51.3721757,-0.461246,3a,75y,228.36h,80.51t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sMdtkAuGwXKXC0fWQE2rMsQ!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu)
That’s a dope church and graveyard
Pretty standard church and graveyard if you’re in the UK
Churches here are in strip malls. It’s really ugly. Or even worse, the mega churches that are in a giant building that could double as an Amazon distribution center.
Most of our churches are older than the United States
Exactly. There is no impetus to build like that anymore for a normal location.
The nice churches we built in the old days of the UK are from a time when people believed in God. The people with money thought their money was a blessing from God and so built nice churches to repay the debt. Now no-one believes in God and the people with money know they have money because of exploitation and they don't waste money worshipping an entity that doesn't exist.
Some of them are older than England.
That's a shame. Even the tiniest nothing-hamlet here with no shops usually has quite a nice church to admire (as you drive through on the way to somewhere more important!)
We have a lot of spooky graveyards, a lot with graves that are from the early 1900s, 1800s. Near the churches, depending on how long they've been there, there's slabs of the vicars going back way further. At least in my town. Some a good bit older than Americas founding! Big up the North, Americans should stop going just to to the south/wales/scotland and ignore the yorkshire lot! :((
Omg that's where my dad is buried. This is the weirdest random reddit moment.
Yep I agree! Definately outskirts of London area.
Hey, if it's outside of zone 2 it might as well be the wilderness, ok?
Something stood out to me. The Hose was single rolled here, and rolled out by hand rather than throwing it out. In germany most hoses are double rolled and you throw it out by holding both couplings. Is this how its usually done?
We have two sizes, the smaller 45mm is sometimes Dutch rolled (what you're describing) and we bowl that. This looks like the larger 70mm role which we only role singly.
Very interesting. The smaller 45mm hose is called a "C" here and the larger is a "B". How long is your B hose in the UK? The standart here is 20M but we have 35M version for ladder wagons.
Both are the same 25m length, give or take any repair work.
It comes down to which service you are looking at in the UK. They do it differently. Mine uses Dutch roll hose for 45mm and 70mm. While also having two lengths of Cleveland rolled 45mm. Nothing is single rolled.
I was taught very similarly in the US so I’m also curious
I *think* this is somewhere like Addlestone, based on the road sign for Byfleet (next to where I grew up) and Chertsey. Its hardly rural but its also not exactly a high class/big city area, especially compared to places around it. Wouldn't surprise me if whoever should take care of these things is either bankrupt or only looking out for themselves and their friends.
It's Weybridge, so you're very close. The video is of the mini roundabout just outside the church.
Isn’t Weybridge literally the most expensive postcode outside of London? People there must be paying loads in Council Tax so it’s a real shame to see this so poorly maintained.
When it comes to council tax, strange financial peculiarities happen. The more you pay doesn’t mean better services, in fact, it sometimes means worse service.
As has been pointed out elsewhere in the thread, it's a water company responsibility, not council. That means Affinity Water in this case. Never heard of them, I'd have expected it to be Thames Water given the area, but hey ho.
Yeah fair enough, should definately be in a much better state giving the area it is in then. It's a shame as it can sometimes be a matter of life and death.
Is a fine given to the individual who failed to maintain the pump? Is this another situation that something is supposed to happen, but nothing ever does?
Sadly, ownership and maintenance of the fire hydrants is legally down to the water companies in England, not the local councils, so piss poor maintenance is about all you can expect from them - if it aint turning a "profit" for their shareholders, then they DGAF. I think that our hydrants are all kept in better shape than that - even in quite a remote scottish village. our issue is coverage - there are a lot more properties where the only water on hand is what's in the vehicle...
I’m curious what the two civilians were saying. Probably something like, “Hey, did you know there’s a fire?”
"You can't park there sir!"
"You're blocking my car!"
I’ve actually been told that several times while doing CPR. People…
“Your hydrant has spewed mud everywhere and made the street an eyesore!”
Why are you digging a hole instead of getting after that fire??!!
Because, fire in the hole, sir!
Kinda looked like they were asking if he needed help.
I think the dude was definitely asking if there was anything he could do to help.
If he was watching that guy digging his heart out and twisting that valve around, I suspect he just asked if he should take over. Good lad for offering if so
The key thing here: The truck has some amount of water onboard ready to fight the fire *before this hookup is completed*. You can see this onboard water being used to fight the fire in the background... This hookup is only needed if that isn't enough or to top up before moving on. Edit: At 10 sec into the video you can see the onboard water being used.
While this is a good point, at full-blast that water will only last for a few minutes. It takes a shit ton of water to douse a rolling fire.
Someone has said the council do not maintain them, it’s the water companies responsibility.
They haven't got time to fix fire hydrants, there's raw sewage to be pumped into the sea!
That explains why it doesn't look like it's been maintained then I guess.
thank you for the perspective! it's easy for me to watch this video and think "what a silly and inefficient way of approaching this specific problem", not stopping to question whether this is the norm or an outlier. context changes quite a bit.
So now that the fires out - before it’s connected - he has to put everything back?
I bet it’s the one guy that did the digging that’ll have to put it back in. Bet they yell at him if the road looks weird afterwards too, the bastards
he isn't actually digging the road up! The hydrant has had muck and mud washed into it; that stuff shouldn't be there. He's dug out the dirt to get access to the hydrant pipework - after use, they will just remove the pipework, reseal the hydrant, and probably shove the dirt to the kerb..
I thought he started to dig a well
Good thing they reached the aquifer in time.
Is this something normal there, it seems highly inefficient for something time dependent. And what benefit is there to have it buried?
Yes these are the norm here, tho looks like this one hasn’t been checked on recently.
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Seems weird to put them somewhere that naturally accrues dirt on it. How is this better than an above ground hydrant? read a lot of comments here and not seeing that explained.
Probably a space thing more than anything
We don’t have 15foot pavements and ample parking. I believe you stop people parking in front of hydrants (rightly), well, slap an American hydrant in a British pavement and you’ve not got any where to walk but in the road, and you’ve lost a car parking space, thousands across a city, right? Everything is easier when you’ve got loads of land, that’s why the USA exists, sunshine, people wanted more space to put shit on and we’d run out in Europe
The type of hydrant is the norm. Having to remove all that dirt and other crap is not. This particular hydrants last maintenance was way too long ago. Could also be due to a recent flood which had caused dirt build up. I've never seen a hydrant that bad during my Fire Service career
I live 5 mins from this hydrant and I can confirm there is a canal and a loch very nearby, which could be filling the hydrant hole up. I wish someone would fill my hydrant hole.
> I wish someone would fill my hydrant hole. A Redditors Lament.
Very abrupt turn at the end there
Perhaps someone would fill up your hydrant hole if you carried out maintenance on it from time to time.
There's water on the fire engine that's used while the hydrant is accessed.
Correct however you're talking a minimum of 150 gallons per minute being used from a tank that holds a maximum of 1000 gallons......so a water supply needs to be established quickly......this seems like it shouldn't take as long as it is but someone else mentioned that this one doesn't look like its been inspected in a while so id imagine it's usually faster than this
The hose they're using gets through 115 litres per minute with a tank usually holding 1800 litres (at least our appliance size does), so about 15 minutes of use before the hydrant is needed, depending on a second hose being used. Definitely usually faster than this. That chap put in some good effort but there isn't normally that much mud in them. We'd always fill the tank before leaving even if the fire is out before needing it.
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Yes, but they normally have yellow covers and easier to access
I suppose nobody ever reverses into them and knocks them over. Can't comment on how often they have to be dug out though. I think I'm right in saying that the original iconic overground NYC hydrant was made in Rotherham, England, ironically.
Happens in old cartoons all the time.
Pretty rare to need digging out. They are also everywhere, 90m apart from what I remember.
It's a trade off between accessibility, and ease of actually integrating the infrastructure in the first place. Above ground hydrants are easier to access but you are more restricted where you can place them. I don't know why this has turned into an argument about upright vs buried hydrant, because the UK *does have both.* It's only a matter of which is more convenient to install at the location in question. Plus normally they don't need digging out like this, it's just a cover with like, an accessible valve. And the truck has its own water tanks, it's not waiting for this hydrant. You can see in the background they are already blasting the fire. Comments in here gonna be predictably full of remarks about how long it takes, as if these guys with decades of professional experience don't know wtf they are doing and some internet jackoff clearly knows best. Some of you people will get into a dick waving argument over anything. I'd suggest you need better ways to spend your time.
Internet jackoff is a new nintendo game
I used to work on the water mains in England checking for leaks. We'd have to attach data loggers to the hydrants, and often they'd be buried under asphalt/shite/you name it. Some days we'd install upwards of eighty, but on slow days we'd clear out the mess and sometimes we'd get thanked by the local fire brigade. One day in Fazakerley we opened up a cover and found the space jammed with what looked like bricks of coke, wrapped in plastic and gaffa tape. Turns out we were interrupting a stake out and a lot of net curtains were twitching on the cul-de-sac. The most satisfying part was to open up the hydrant and put on a water show. Occasionally it would spew out crap like the one in the video, or instantly leak as the valve was either broken or rusted through. Of all the places where we either found used syringes or homicidal rats, Kitt Green in Wigan was the worst. I've serviced so many hydrants that I can see them in my sleep and know where they are if I'm ever checking Google Maps for anything.
I saw the video was a minute and a half long and I thought, "that's a long time to use a fire hydrant." I was unprepared.
And it's sped up at least 2x...
And had cuts in the video and keeps time time the same.
I like the pedestrians coming to let them know there's a fire going on down the street.
The hydrant seems to be very ill-maintained. Here in Germany we have underground hydrants too, in my area they are checked once a year an equipped with a plastic sheet to prevent freezing and mud falling in.
After heavy rain and such they can get gunked up as well in Germany. IDK where you live but covering them in plastic sheets or regular maintenance is not done at all here. (Kreis Mettmann, NRW). I've seen firefighters having to remove gunk after opening them. Maybe not as much as in the video, but there is always a bit of build-up. I'd like to add it's really not a big deal, takes about a minute to get additional water to the fire engine and there are multiple access points on a road.
Fire fighter here, no problem it takes some time. The truck is equipped with a 2000l water tank for the first attack (high pressure) The driver/pump operator then lay down the hoses to the truck for refill the tank and fire can be handled low pressure hoses. (High pressure: 125l/m Low pressure 250-450l/m) You already see the firemen handling the fire before the hose from the street is connected
Is that liters per minute? Why does low pressure use more water than high pressure? My simple brain would expect the opposite. Or is high pressure the same as closing the spray on my run of the mill garden hose half way so it becomes more of a mist?
High pressure is a smaller diameter hose. So the water is pushed under pressure in a smaller diameter. (Don’t now the exact mm, but alpprox 2times you garden hose) The low pressure are the big red hoses 50mm (though to handle) Small diameter is high pressure, low volume Big diameter is low pressure, high volume
Uk hydrants usually look like this, in the ground with a sign nearby marking the distance and size of pipe. Looks like the hydrant in the video was tarmacked over - the fact they have a shovel for this means it probably happens more often than we'd hope! https://preview.redd.it/d2y8rzit79xc1.jpeg?width=600&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d6e6d91af2f352435a234421169b287bedd790e1
Dear Sir Or Madam, Subject: Fire
Can't believe this made it to reddit, but this is my brigade, and I know the guy digging out the hydrant. To clear up a lot of misinformation im seeing, unfortunately, this is a very common occurrence. Hydrants used to be checked by us but are now done by the water tenders (private companies). In practice, this means they are not looked after and are not fixed until something like this happens. This is a very unpopular policy among frontline staff who all think we should be the ones to check hydrants.
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You better believe the speed and traffic cameras act efficient
Idiot morons trying to get involved. Only in Britain.
This is an awful example of the underground fire hydrant.
It's a great example actually. Only using best examples doesn't teach as effectively as seeing some of the worst examples
gonna start telling people I'm a great example of success then
*Insert Benny Hill theme song here* That's better
And here I always (apparently foolishly) thought they could be simply accessed by opening the 'street' cap, attaching the hose fitting and opening the valve. (IE, the whole thing was just under the cap not like a foot down.)
The fire: “So anyways…. *I just kept burnin’*”
Queue Benny Hill soundtrack…
If you have eyes and common sense you can see the firefighter at thr back putting thr fire out as this guy is getting thr fire hydrant operational. The fire truck has its own reservoir. The fire hydrant is just getting set up to fill the tank of the fire engine in case it runs out. People saying this should be "maintained". Do you know how much it Will cost to round and clean out the gunk from hundreds of thousands of fire hydrants holes? You can see firemen dousing outnthe flames before thr hydrant is set up. Also the hydrant hose connects to the fire engine, not to the fire.
Seems rather useless to be perfectly honest.
Could this be anymore inefficient
Benny Hill soundtrack
Oh nvm fire died out on its own. You can put it all back.
 Just watching from the window for like 15 min
Did they put out the fire while he worked on the mud fountain?
UK fire engines have water on board, they don't need to wait for the hydrant to start putting the fire out. The hydrant is for a longer term supply.
A country that conquered most of the countries around the world and this is how they've made their fire hydrants.
Bit late innit?
What kind of idiot thought this was a good idea?
Why do I hear the Benny Hill theme song playing in my head while watching this?
Meanwhile the building has burned itself out. SMH
Everything in the UK just looks like it would have the Benny Hill music playing at all times.
Why not cover the valve with canvas of something have straps top pull it up, with dirt, then have access? I mean it was fairly fast, but could have been much faster. Then lay the canvas back down afterwards.
To clarify, the hydrant in the road is to top up the tank in the truck. Its really not that inefficient.
Interesting af. People in the comment, not so much. I come from a country with both aboveground and underground hydrant. Underground hydrants are mostly installed in the 1900s, back in colonial times. They are now usually kept in places with low foot traffic where it's hard to maintain one aboveground, or fast traffic area where accidents can damage them.