(August 27 photo by Tony Bradley)
By Tracy Record
West Seattle Blog editor

New water mains, yes. Added sidewalks, no.

That’s one of the points we got clarified, following up on Wednesday morning’s Arbor Heights fire briefing before the Seattle City Council’s Public Safety and Education Committee.

You can watch the entire briefing in our Wednesday-morning story; we summarized the briefing documents’ key points in this story from the night before.

But we had a few followup questions, so, adding the answers to the additional information that emerged at the briefing – primarily regarding the plan to upgrade water mains in the area where they were too small to provide adequate “fire flow”:

(August 27 photo by Tracy Record)
The August 27th fire destroyed a home near 41st/102nd. The column of smoke could be seen for many miles; we were at the fire scene long before the flames were extinguished, writing and reporting from the alley behind it, where dozens of neighbors also stood gaping at the scene, particularly the spectre of firefighters who could not do their jobs without adequate water supply. Since fast, powerful response is par for the course, one WSB’er put it in an exchange with us, that it was “shocking” to see a home, “in the city,” burn virtually to the ground.

(August 27 photo by Tony Bradley)
“In the city,” actually, hints at a large part of the problem. The hydrant and water-main shortcomings — costing the firefighters precious time as they search for an adequate water supply — trace back to before Arbor Heights was annexed into the city more than half a century ago. Firefighters ultimately had to go almost half a mile to get an adequate supply; the documents for Wednesday’s briefing say the supply problem wasn’t fully fixed till more than half an hour after firefighters first arrived.

(August 27 photo by Tracy Record)
As for why the “village”-size mains hadn’t been upgraded sooner – the committee was told that the “Local Improvement District” process, in which area voters would be asked to pay for the upgrades, was how these things usually happened, but that LIDs had been proposed and defeated twice in that time. (This was noted in WSB comments during an earlier followup.)

Firefighters ultimately had to roll out almost half a mile of hose to get to a hydrant that could provide 1,000 gallons a minute. That is the current “residential standard,” according to briefers, and they said it takes an 8-inch water main to provide that. Some of the lines in Arbor Heights area are only 2- or 4-inch, and those are the ones that will be replaced. Throughout the city, there are 950 hydrants that don’t and can’t meet fire-flow standards, the committee was told, but the largest concentration was in Arbor Heights. (SPU says a plan is in development to address the other areas.)

When the water-main upgrades planned for Arbor Heights – at a cost of $2.2 million – are complete in a year or so, everyone in AH (1,700 “properties”) will be within 1,000 feet of that kind of hydrant, and 87 percent will be within 500 feet of a hydrant with that capability, the councilmembers were told. SPU says the lengths of water-main to be replaced – or, in the case of a 50-foot “gap” at 42nd/Roxbury, added – total 3,600 feet, which is roughly two-thirds of a mile.

(November 2011 photo by Kevin McClintic)
As we reported earlier this fall, hydrant work already has been done, completed in mid-November, with one hydrant added – SPU says the hydrant work cost $140,000. (More details in this WSB report from November.) Upgrading hydrants that were “village hydrants” – without the type of hose ports needed to take advantage of full water flow – could only be done where an 8-inch water main lay below; it wouldn’t have helped in the areas with the smaller water mains. For those that could be upgraded, the committee was told that improved potential firefighting water flow by about 25 percent.

Separate from that issue, Councilmember Bruce Harrell asked, whose responsibility is it to make sure they are working? Fire Chief Gregory Dean said the 18,000 hydrants around the city are tested by fire crews annually – and that records showed the ones near the Arbor Heights fire scene had been tested in 2010 and 2011 – but they just test to make sure there’s water, not volume and flow. Harrell wondered if the problem brought to light by the Arbor Heights house fire was something on the magnitude for what City Light had to do last year after “stray voltage” by a street light killed an animal, touching off citywide inspections and replacements; SFD and SPU said, basically, “no,” and that they were addressing “fire flow” issues anyway – this just sped it up for Arbor Heights.

Chief Dean also mentioned the technology upgrade so that fire crews will have access to maps of mains and hydrants. He elaborated on what it finally took for them to get the information that day – a Lake City crew monitoring the radio traffic looked it up!

Next step: SPU says a community meeting about the water-main work will be scheduled in January (no date yet). The torn-up roads will be repaved in January 2013. But there is no SDOT component to the project right now for adding sidewalks while the road work is under way, according to Ingrid Goodwin of SPU, though that is something that residents have been requesting for a long time – an AH resident who spoke to the council committee at the start of Wednesday’s meeting mentioned them too.

And another question that had emerged in our followups: Whether SFD considered seeking “mutual aid” from North Highline, whose fire station in White Center isn’t far from Arbor Heights. Councilmember Tim Burgess, who chairs the committee, asked about that. Chief Dean didn’t definitively answer “No” but did say that (a) it’s up to dispatchers to determine – “we tend to ask for resources as we exhaust (our) resources” – and (b) NH uses “paid and volunteer firefighters” so “there’s a level of training difference.”