(Spirit Lake)– Area fire departments have an important reminder as those snow piles continue to mount. Spirit Lake Fire Chief Pat Daly says they’re asking anyone with a fire hydrant on their property to dig out around it…
“If you can’t do it get a neighbor to help you or something and dig out around it, that way we don’t have to start looking for it. If we come up on a structure fire and we have to look for a hydrant, dig it out, that takes time and fire, you know, it almost doubles itself every 30 seconds so if it takes three or four minutes to dig that hydrant out that’s just that much longer that it’s going to take to get it out. Although we do carry some water on the truck, it’s always better to have a hook on that hydrant, so. But if they could dig that out, that would be great.”
Daly says they do have a map as to where hydrants are located, but he says not even that does much good if they have to dig one out…
“Yeah, we’ve got a system from the emergency manager here in Dickinson county and we actually have the hydrants plotted on a map so we carry an I-pad in the truck now and we can hit that and we can tell where it is, but still if we have to go dig for it, you know, sometimes it takes a long time to dig some of that snow out. Because I know there’s a lot of corners that are getting pushed up and they don’t have nowhere else to put the stuff and we’re just kind of stuck right now.”
Daly has some other important reminders as well with all of the snow out there…
“Watch your gas meters, make they’re not buried, your drier vents, anything that vents air outside, you know, because we’ve got to get rid of that carbon monoxide. We don’t need that in the house. Have you seen many issues with that so far? We’ve been on two or three calls already with gas meters buried and we even had a propane tank the other day with a valve froze and stuff, so it’s just worth keeping an eye on.”
Officials say motorists also need to use extra caution as visibility at many intersections is restricted due to piles of snow.
