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Apparently there’s a serious problem with fire hydrants in the District.:

According to D.C. Fire Chief Dennis Rubin, up to 14 percent of the city’s fire hydrants are broken and another 15 percent require immediate repair.

Rubin said his estimates are based on recent fire department inspections.

The fire chief told a D.C. City Council committee Wednesday about how much it hurts firefighters’ efforts to tap a hydrant that doesn’t work when fighting a fire.

I would have thought “broken” and “require immediate repair” are terms that pretty much describe each other but the real fun part is that the Water and Sewer Authority, who are the guys that fix the hydrants, see things quite a bit differently.

WASA General Manager Jerry N. Johnson stuck to his contention that only a fraction of hydrants are out of service, saying that WASA knew of only 29 as of Monday.

Further complicating the issue is the fact that apparently we don’t know anything.

At the hearing yesterday, officials couldn’t get a definitive answer on the number of hydrants in the city. Fire department and WASA officials said they think there are about 9,000, but they said they are still counting, identifying and cataloging them.

 A little under a year ago the City Paper ran a story in which they were told by WASA that around 100 of the little buggers were broken.  So over the past 9 months we have either fixed 71 or broken 2500.  To keep the math theme going, the city says it will cost 26.5 million to fix them which is just about 13 million less than what it’s going to cost to rebuild Eastern Market and the Georgetown library.

-Liam

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