Hydrants failed as fire gutted mobile home

Two fire hydrants failed in Stratmoor Hills on Wednesday morning as a fire gutted a mobile home, leaving firefighters with nothing to do for what they estimated to be 8 to 12 minutes.

For at least two months, the Stratmoor Hills Water District had known that one of those hydrants on Denise Drive was broken, but it was not repaired or hooded to let firefighters know it wasn’t working, according to district officials.

The omission highlighted a lack of checks and balances in the small water district west of Colorado Springs in unincorporated El Paso County.

“Because of that, my nephew lost his house, but they could have lost their lives,” said Brad Taylor, uncle of homeowner Preston Taylor. “Had the winds been any different, this whole valley could have gone up.”  

Now Preston Taylor is shopping for a lawyer.

His wife, Michelle Taylor was home with their 3-year-old son about 9:30 a.m. Wednesday at 1225 Denise Drive when he noticed that a fire had started near the fireplace. She thinks a coal might have fallen out and sparked it.

“The fire was small then, maybe I could have put it out, but my first instinct was to get my son out of there,” she said.

She ran to a neighbor’s house to drop off her son and wanted to return to collect important documents but the neighbor, Theresa Illes, insisted they call 911 and let the fire department handle it.

Flames were shooting from the front of the home and smoke filled the sky when firefighters arrived. They initially used water from the two 500 gallon tanks on their engines. That was gone within minutes, said Mark Parker, interim fire chief for Stratmoor Hills Fire Department. He said they left some water in the tanks in case any neighboring homes caught fire.

Firefighters tried a hydrant two doors down from the home. It didn’t work. Water district officials say it had a faulty draining system and had frozen. However, it was working properly when it was checked in October, they said.

Next, firefighters tried to set up a hose at a hydrant about 300 yards up the block.

That hydrant also had been inspected by the water district in October and it had a broken or faulty seal that leaked water when they tested it, said Ralph Ravenscroft, manager of the water district. Crew members planned to fix it the next day so they didn’t place a hood on it – a common practice to alert firefighters that a hydrant is broken. That night, a water main broke in the area and the same repair crew responded, working overtime to fix it.

The broken hydrant was forgotten.

On Wednesday morning, when firefighters tried to set up a hose it gushed gallons of water onto the street from under its bonnet, rendering it unusable.

Left without water, fire crews watched as the fire gutted the home. Parker estimates that crews waited for 8 to 12 minutes for help from the Fort Carson and Colorado Springs fire departments.

“I ran across the street and screamed ‘do something,’” she said. “But they couldn’t.”

Firefighters could have done more had they had working hydrants, Parker said.

“That’s very crucial time, especially on a trailer. They burn fairly quickly,” Parker said. “Whether it would have saved the home or not, I can’t say.”

A Fort Carson crew, coming from another direction, found a working hydrant about 500 yards away from the home. Another hydrant was found a street over and firefighters broke down a backyard fence to run a hose.

The fire was out by 11 a.m. The family’s turtle, Rex, had died inside. On Wednesday, the home was a charred mess with a melted child’s plastic slide in the front yard and icicles clinging to the blackened rafters.

Nothing inside was salvageable, said Preston Taylor. His homeowner’s insurance payment was due at the beginning of the month and he put it off to pay for Christmas, he said. He planned to pay it when the family received money from its tax return.

Gordon Halvorson, superintendent for the water district, said the error was regrettable. He said the water district, which doesn’t have an electronic system to track the repairs, didn’t have any checks to ensure that the work was done.

“We keep track by paper and it just got overlooked,” he said. “It’s a terrible, terrible thing.”

In the future, he said crews will be required to turn over paperwork to superiors at the end of each day. He said the district also has purchased a computer data system that it hopes to have up and running by the end of the year.

This isn’t the first time in the region when hydrants have failed at a critical time.

Almost five years ago, on Jan. 16 2007, a fire tore through the Castle West Apartments in one of the biggest blazes in the Colorado Springs’ history. That night, firefighters couldn’t open a hydrant to the southwest of the complex and said the problem cost them important time. Two people died in that fire.  

Two weeks later, Colorado Springs firefighters were trying to fight a house fire on Stanton Street when the hydrant was frozen and, again, it cost firefighters time.

Steve Berry, a utilities spokesman, said they had implemented a plan in 2006 to inspect each of the city’s 16,000 hydrants every three years. Crews continue to do the inspections and keep track of the broken hydrants by entering the information with handheld computers through an electronic database, he said.

High priority hydrants, in areas where there is a high density of people, are fixed almost immediately, he said. Low-priority hydrants, where there are other hydrants nearby, can sometimes take up to a month to fix, he said.

Halvorson said the Stratmoor Hills water district doesn’t have the money for such a sophisticated system. Each of the district’s 250 hydrants are checked every two years.

“This was never an issue before and we never had to put any checks and balances in,” he said. “Now we’ve put in some checks and balances.”

On Thursday, water district crews were in the neighborhood of the burned home inspecting each hydrant. They weren’t able to fix the hydrant closest to the burned home and instead covered it with a black trash bag and yellow police tape to warn firefighters.

For Preston Taylor, their efforts were too little, too late.

“It’s tragic that it took this to get them off their rumps to fix it.”

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Contact Maria St. Louis-Sanchez: 636-0274
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