2023 Tri-State Seminar, August 7-10 in Las Vegas – Event Recap The Las Vegas Tri-State Seminar has grown into a major event in the water industry calendar, and it keeps getting better (and bigger). This year’s event hosted 4,400 attendees, an increase of over 1,000 attendees from 2022. The theme was “Weird Science: Predicting and […]
Gabriel Gomez, Operations Manager at Liberty Utilities, knows all too well how to identify a hydrant ‘knockoff.’ For a man who’s dealt with the problems caused by knockoffs for over 25 years, putting an end to emergencies from water surges has been long overdue.
After more than 30 years in the water industry, Danny Aceves knows how things work on (and under) the ground. Since his promotion to Distribution Supervisor for the City of Pomona, he’s been tasked, among other priorities, with a bigger challenge: how to protect city assets and private property from broken hydrants.
Danny’s team deals with a hydrant shear roughly once every ten days. The vast majority of hydrant shears don’t make the news (in 15 years at Pomona, Danny hasn’t seen a single one picked up in the media). He considers this fortunate but doesn’t take it for granted.
2023 WaterWisePro Maintenance & Construction Expo Recap Over 200 vendors and 1,000 attendees joined us at the Water Wise Pro Maintenance & Construction Expo in Pleasanton, CA last week. The Hydrant Guard + Advanced Conservation Management touched base with existing customers and friends, and made dozens of new connections among attendees. A special shout out […]
Hydrant History: The California Type Hydrant Until 1850, hydrant innovation focused on dry-barrel designs that worked well in the cold. But California’s climate called for different types of fire hydrants. San Francisco was reeling from a destructive blaze in 1851. At that time, there were no fire insurance companies: what was lost in the fire […]
Hydrant History: The World’s First Fire Hydrants Getting water out of the ground remained an unsolved problem in 1800, despite all the advances in underground infrastructure; firefighters had either to plunge buckets in the nearest cistern or dig down to perforate the wooden mains that conveyed water before metal pipes. Before the invention of hydrants, […]
Hydrant History: Founding Fathers & Firefighters The History of Philadelphia’s Union Fire Company Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Paul Revere, John Hancock, Alexander Hamilton, Samuel Adams: what do they have in common? Yes, protecting home and hearth from the Redcoats and, as it happens, the red flames. The invigorating mixture of new cities and revolutionary fervor […]
Hydrant History: America’s First Fire Teams A Look at Colonial America’s Earliest Organizations, and New England’s First Paid Firefighter From bucket brigades to the first professional firefighter, early American settlers never stopped innovating to keep fire from consuming their growing cities. The first American settlement, Jamestown, was founded in 1607. Captain John Smith led […]
Hydrant History: The Great Fire of London of 1666 A Look at One of History’s Most Destructive Fires London in 1666 was a wooden city. Houses leaned up against each other like logs in a bonfire. Typical building materials were good tinder at best, or purely combustible at worst. Many of the city’s poor lived […]
Hydrant History: The Great Fire of Rome, 64 AD A Glimpse into Firefighting Tactics in the Roman Empire One of the first conflagrations of recorded history gives an example of how dramatically an urban landscape can change after demolition by fire. Like the California of today, Rome had been suffering years of drought. The […]