Obtaining Water Without a Hydrant

What do you do when “Johnny Hydrantseed” hasn’t yet visited your area, or if the hydrants you do have just can’t provide enough water to handle the incident in front of you? You can either give up (shouldn’t be an option), or find an alternative water supply, such as a pond, lake, stream, river, bay, pool or another body of water to draft from. Even if you have hydrants throughout your coverage area, there’s that chance that you’ll still need to draft if the water flow you need to control the fire isn’t able to be met by the available hydrant water supply, or if for some reason your hydrant system fails. If you seek an alternative, you must be prepared to draft.

Drafting Preparation

Being prepared to draft isn’t as simple as carrying basic suction hose and a barrel strainer on your apparatus. Where are your drafting points/alternative water sources? How do you access them? What equipment do you need to access the alternative water supplies you have available? Will it be easy to use, and provide the highest flow capability possible based upon the apparatus pump size and the available water from the alternative source? Guess what? These are all things you need to think about now instead of waiting until the incident to figure it out. My district, and several around it, has preplanned water supply points in our Web-based preplanning software that we all share, so it’s easy for any of us to know where to get water even in a mutual aid situation.

If you must draft, you need to have the right equipment to make it happen, and you need to know how to use it. A centrifugal fire pump (which is what almost every fire department pumping apparatus uses) will not work properly when it has air in it; it must be flooded with liquid and have the air removed from it for it to function properly. The pump will work poorly, or not at all, when filled partially or fully with air. A priming device attached to the fire pump will pull a vacuum on the pump, allowing water from the static source to be “pulled” into the pump, flooding it with water–this is known as “priming the pump.”

Once primed/flooded, the function of the centrifugal pump takes over and generally works quite effectively. However, for this function to continue operating well there has to be little to no air in the system during priming and pumping. Once you get the draft established, it’s important to keep the water flowing. If attack lines are being opened and then shut down, it would behoove the pump operator to open a discharge somewhere, “dumping” water (back into the folding tank if that is your supply) continuously to maintain the draft.

Modern flexible “hard” suction hose has many advantages over the old black “hard sleeves.” It is much lighter in weight, can bend in a tight radius and in many cases you can see through the hose to look for air pockets or bubbles that can reduce the effectiveness of the draft. It must have airtight connections to allow the pump to function properly. There are several tricks to this, including ensuring that the gaskets on the suction hose are in good shape, with some folks using a coating of compatible petroleum jelly or spray lubricant to keep the gaskets flexible and provide a good seal. Whatever is used should be included in the manufacturer’s recommendations. A graphite lubricant, or similar as recommended by the manufacturer, can be used on the swivel. Others have suggested carrying a roll of duct tape to seal up the connections. Most importantly, each drafting connection point needs to be tight, so be sure to carry a rubber mallet to completely tighten each connection before trying to draft.

Drafting Tools

What if the drafting point isn’t deep enough to pull a draft from, especially on a creek or stream? If that occurs, you can build a temporary dam to create a point deep enough for drafting. Start by using ladders and salvage covers. Even a backhoe or other construction equipment might be pressed into service to create a hole that water can sit in to draft from in an extreme emergency. At an incident where uncontaminated runoff is pooling, you might even consider drafting from it and reusing it on the incident.

When drafting from a folding tank, you want to be able to draft the tank as low as possible. Unfortunately, doing so can often create a whirlpool, which can pull air into the pump and hurt the draft. Placing a basketball, volleyball or similar floating object in the tank can manage that whirlpool.

There are also low-level strainers with a jet siphon on them that can be fed by a 1½”, 1¾” or 2″ handline to enable use of the strainer down to only a few inches of water in the tank, but this will require skill and focus from the pump operator to work properly. Similar jet siphons can be put in place on hard sleeves to move water from tank to tank in a dump tank operation. (See pros and cons of different types of strainers in “Do You Know How to Flow?” from FireRescue’s March 2012 issue, p. 34 (www.firefighternation.com/article/strategy-and-tactics/drafting-tools-techniques).

Besides large apparatus pumps, portable pumps and skid units on brush/attack trucks might be used to draft. While these pumps might not have the same individual capacity as a large apparatus pump does, several of them operating together might just create a 1,000-gpm flow, which can be fed to a dump tank that a larger apparatus can pull from or into multiple intakes in that larger apparatus. This operation will require significant staffing and equipment to set up, someone to carefully coordinate it and the supply capacity to handle the full flow being taken from the source, but it can be an effective way to support fireground operations.

Making It Reach

If you cannot easily get your apparatus to the draft site, you may be able to piece together additional lengths of hard sleeve to reach, as long as the lift is not too great and it’s mostly a horizontal run. It will take longer to prime the pump, because you need to remove all the air from the suction hose, and you must ensure all the connection points are airtight. Some companies carry hard suction in longer lengths than the typical 10 feet, which reduces the connections and leak points, but those hoselines might be difficult to store on the apparatus.

If the distance to the water supply is still too far, consider using an eductor drafting device. There are several on the market now, one that is a folding unit, and another that sits in the water. In both cases, the units require a supply from a 1½”, 1¾” or 2″ handline into the unit with a large-diameter hose (LDH) supply line out and are capable of flowing 600-gpm or more, even when up to 200 feet from the water source. These units take practice to use properly to ensure return flow without losing your entire booster tank of water into the unit. There are also self-filling vacuum tankers that are equipped to fill themselves from a static water source.

Final Thoughts

Remember that drafting requires pumping horsepower, which uses fuel. If you’re running a drafting operation, be sure someone checks in with the apparatus operators on occasion to ensure they have enough fuel to continue. If you’re drafting on a fireground or other emergency scene, the apparatus is the critical part of the operation.

Many of these drafting operations require a good deal of skill from the pump operator, which will only come with practice. Although it may not happen that often, any pump operator can be called upon to draft at an incident–and must be ready to perform when called upon. Take the time now to practice these skills so that you are ready when the bell rings. missing image file