Firefighters dispatched to a Lakeville restaurant last summer were confronted with an unpleasant surprise, a situation waiting for emergency crews in a number of Twin Cities suburbs.
The nearest fire hydrant didn't work.
They rushed to a second hydrant and were able to quickly extinguish the small fire. But Fire Chief Mike Meyer said they were fortunate. "There's a time loss. You wind up diverting people away from extinguishing the fire to dragging the hose," he said.
The unsettling situation was discovered in other suburbs, too. While most hydrants are owned and maintained by cities, some communities also have ones that are privately owned. They were often installed at apartment and townhouse complexes but also can be found next to strip malls, warehouses and some churches.
And many of them didn't work.
City officials in Burnsville, Lakeville and Eagan discovered last year that most owners weren't maintaining their hydrants and didn't even know they should. "They were under the impression their hydrants were public, and that the city was taking care of them," said Steve Albrecht, Burnsville's public works director.
In some cases, decades had passed with the hydrants uninspected. Tests suggest that as many as one in five of the private hydrants in the cities don't work.
Minnesota's fire code requires that all hydrants be inspected annually and kept in working order.