Firefighter descending, "The stick."

[stsinner]

Were you pumping river water on that last shot? It looks kind of brownish.

Yes, we were, "Drafting" from the lake, but the water usually is brownish, no matter where we're pumping from-either the truck's tanks or a dry hydrant, because the water sits in the hydrants so long that when we refill the trucks after training or a fire they're filled with the crappiest water that's been festering in the hydrant lines.. It clears up eventually, of course, but usually the water we see coming out looks nasty at first.

In this picture you can see that we're connected to a, "Dry hydrant," which is a hydrant that goes down into a lake and has a strainer on the end of the pipe.. We draw a suction on the hydrant and suck the water out of the body of water. We can pump over 2000 gallons per minute using this method. You can not only identify this hose as suction hose by its massive size, but the ribbed design indicates that it's suction hose and won't collapse when sucking water out of a body of water.. The normal hose we use for a hydrant under pressure is jacketed rubber 4" hose that is smooth and would collapse under the slightest suction, as it's very pliable.

Suction hose maintains its shape and is not very pliable. This is why it is normally layed along the sides of the trucks like this:

This is standard 4" hose that connects the trucks to the pressurized hydrants. As you can see, it lays flat and could never suck water from a dry hydrant.