47,000 Miami-Dade fire hydrants in good shape, if you have access

The Los Angeles fire disaster has prompted Miami-Dade officials to analyze how prepared this county is to deal with a similar emergency. The county’s 47,000 fire hydrants are all tested and working, they said, but many areas of the county have no access to hydrants at all.

As a result, the chairs of the tourism and infrastructure committees agreed Monday to push legislation to encourage municipalities to check their hydrants and water pressure as they discussed encouraging unincorporated areas to migrate from wells to the county water system.

“I think this is a great opportunity for us to tackle the well issue,” Raquel Regalado, the infrastructure committee chair, told the Recreation and Tourism Committee. She recounted the 40-year push to get Pinecrest onto the county water system that succeeded only by showing how much the change would reduce Pinecrest residents’ fire insurance costs.

Tourism committee chair René García raised the issue at the end of a meeting. Roy Coley, who until a recent promotion headed the Water and Sewer Department, recounted efforts to get the county’s hydrants up to standard in the past few years after finding that “our hydrants needed additional maintenance.”

“What we have done,” Mr. Coley said, “is hired a dedicated team of water and sewer professionals who are in charge of 47,000 fire hydrants in this county.” Since then, “all 47,000 have been tested, the ones that needed rebuilt, and today they are all functioning as they should, and in addition to that we’ve done a complete hydraulic model analysis of our water system to be sure it could sustain the fire flows. All of that was completed last year, and the dedicated staff that we hired continues on to keep cycling through those 47,000 hydrants.”

Those, he said, are the county’s hydrants and those of the City of Miami that the county is responsible for, but “there are communities within our county that Miami-Dade County Water and Sewer and the fire department are not responsible for, and I’m not speaking to those.”

“If you have wells you do not have access to Miami-Dade Water and Sewer,” Ms. Regalado cautioned. “It’s important when you look at fire hydrants to also look at the unincorporated areas of Miami-Dade County…. If they are on well, that means that they do not have access to fire hydrants, so you need to bring the infrastructure to do that.”

In addition to the lack of access to fire hydrants, Ms. Regalado noted the possibility of contamination of wells and that wells do not work when electricity is lost. “I would tell you to look at the state of our hydrants, but also you would be surprised how many areas of unincorporated Miami-Dade do not have fire hydrants because they’re on well water.”

In firefighting in those areas, she said, water must be pumped from a swimming pool or else from a special county fire vehicle that brings water to the scene.

The committee directed Mr. Coley to develop a report for the full county commission on the state of county hydrants and their ability to respond in a conflagration.

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