Editorial: Questions about hydrant in Jeannette fire require answers
Share this post:
You need water every day.
We drink it. We cook with it. We bathe in it, wash our clothes with it, brush our teeth with it.
But we also tend to take it for granted. We think about it most when it’s in short supply — when tasked with boil-water orders or asked to restrict use because of a shortage.
Even then, we take it as a given that when we need water from a faucet or a pipe, it will be there.
On Wednesday, just after midnight, there was water out of a hydrant on Guy Street in Jeannette. There just wasn’t enough.
“We laid out line immediately from the hydrant down here. The hydrant wasn’t giving us enough water to make it up the hill,” Jeannette fire Chief Bill Frye said.
The water was carried up a hill by a 6-inch line, according to Frye and Municipal Authority of Westmoreland County. Frye said the size of the line was a contributing factor to the water supply issues. Firefighters made up for it with a second hydrant and multiple tanker trucks to fight a blaze that burned one house to the ground, gutted another and even damaged a firetruck with its heat.
That fire claimed the lives of a father and four of his children.
“By the point we got water, the main house was already collapsing,” Frye said.
The authority says it is diligent about the maintenance and operation of its 8,700 hydrants, and $300,000 is budgeted for repair and replacement in the 2024-25 fiscal year alone.
But that doesn’t change the fact that the topography of some areas makes water supply a challenge. That’s no one’s fault. However, pipes that are perfectly adequate in one area don’t do the job in another. The age of the infrastructure is another issue.
The Guy Street hydrant was within the standards for the National Fire Protection Association, coming in at 82 pounds of force per square inch. But if firefighters still struggle to get what they need from a hydrant, that’s a problem. Every second counts when dealing with a house fire.
Investigation into the Guy Street fire is ongoing. All of the questions are still being asked.
But there is always time to find ways to improve services that affect people’s lives, like the life-saving water that comes out of a fire hydrant.