The Aylesford and District Volunteer Fire Department pulled apart this ‘dry hydrant’ when no water came from it. This is what they discovered.
Fish.
And lots of them!
“We had a hard time getting any suction from the dry hydrant,” said Shawn Carey, chief of the Aylesford and District Volunteer Fire Department according to CBCNews. “We took it apart because we thought we might have had a gasket gone in one of our lines.”
There were almost a dozen fish stuffed into the hydrant, and they weren’t guppies.
Photo: Aylesford and District Volunteer Fire Department
“It was a first for all of us and there were four or five guys standing there and some of them have been firefighters for a long time and nobody had seen anything like that,” he said.
“I know some fire departments in the area have had problems with salamanders in the dry hydrants, but never fish.”
Some of the fish survived, and were tossed back in the nearby pond to swim around like typical fish do. Eventually the hydrant was cleared, the fire was put out, and all was back to normal. And, for the die-hard fishermen — we know what you’re thinking. We’d highly advise leaving the hydrant fish to firefighters and sticking to your ponds, lakes, and rivers!
In case you were dying of curiosity how a fire hydrant typically operates, here’s a video from some firefighting experts:
