PRESIDIO – Since late February, the Presidio Volunteer Fire Department has tested all 97 fire hydrants in the area and discovered that five of them could not be operated, according to the inspection reports obtained by The Presidio International. A number of others were experiencing minor issues, like being partially buried in the ground, leaking from their bases or surrounded by vegetation. 

One of the faulty hydrants is right behind Porter’s, on Cassell and Bomar. “It seems to be shut. We couldn’t get it to open, so we identified it as not operable,” said Jesús Hermosillo, a captain at the volunteer fire department who has been spearheading the inspection process. 

Oscar Moreno, the manager of the Porter’s in Presidio, said, “It’s a concern. It’s a grocery store and the only one in town, and it needs to be running.”

Hermosillo said that the department does conduct periodic inspections but hadn’t documented which hydrants were malfunctioning since he joined the fire department about four years ago. 

The fire department volunteers first started inventorying all of the hydrants in town, as they wanted to produce a comprehensive map of all the hydrants in the area that they could keep handy in the fire truck. “That way when we respond to a call we can have that available to us,” Hermosillo said.

“On the map that the city uses, it’s not very accurate with respect to where the hydrants are,” Hermosillo said. “There are a lot of hydrants that are missing on the map, then there’s some hydrants they say are there, but in reality aren’t there.”

While conducting the fire hydrant inspections, Hermosillo noticed that there were large swaths of town that did not have any hydrants nearby. “We already knew anecdotally, you could say, that the coverage of the hydrants was very sporadic. We might find one here. We might find one there. We never knew if they were operable or not,” he said. “When we started mapping them we were like, ‘Wow there’s some really big gaps here.’”

The fire department is currently preparing a report to present at city council that will highlight all of the spots in town that are not within reasonable range of a hydrant. “There’s a very stark deficiency of fire hydrants in town,” Hermosillo said.

In addition to not having enough hydrants, Hermosillo said that the hydrants the city has installed are not dispersed evenly throughout town. “There’s no real pattern in the distribution. Some of them are clustered together and there are some areas that are like, ‘Wow, there’s nothing here.’” According to the coordinates of the hydrants on the inspection reports, there are around 13 hydrants installed on the 50 or so acres of land that the Border Patrol federal housing complex is built on. That’s about as many hydrants that cover the entire southeast side of town past fourth street, which encompasses about 450 acres of land. 

In a meeting two weeks ago, Hermosillo updated the city council on the status of the hydrant mapping. “I know where I live personally, if there’s a fire in my house, I might as well just pull up a lawn chair and watch it burn, because the closest fire hydrant is more than 500 feet [away],” he said at the meeting.

Councilman John Razo suggested the fire department carry longer hoses in the fire trucks. “I remember we had 1500 ft,” said Razo, who used to volunteer at the fire department. “That was the whole reason we got the 1500 ft, because we knew that the fire hydrants were really far apart.”

Right now, the department carries around 500 to 550 feet worth of hose in its trucks, according to Hermosiilo. “We can carry more hose, but there are some limitations on that as well,” Hermosillo said. “There’s only a set amount of distance that you can be from that hydrant based on the constraints of the pressure inside the hose.”

Hermosillo said he expects to be able to complete his report in time for the city council meeting in July. “I think a lot of people in town may not realize the importance of having those hydrants spaced evenly throughout the city so that we can better respond and serve the community,” he said. “I understand the city is constrained monetarily with installing new hydrants, but maybe we can work something out.”