Plotting Fire Hydrant locations

Plotting Fire Hydrant locations

Overview

For community resilience, it's useful to have local knowledge of where the fire hydrants are in your town or village. Of course, the fire service will have their own records, but the local knowledge of residents and council members can be invaluable when looking at your area's resilience.

Understanding the hydrant signs

You'll all have seen these "out in the wild". They're a yellow sign with a black H, with a top and a bottom number.
  1. The top number is the diameter of the pipe, usually in millimetres (but older ones can be in imperial measurements)
  2. The bottom number is the distance in metres the hydrant is from the sign
Some are ground level set into a concrete post, some are on lampposts, you can find them anywhere!
a photo of a hydrant sign

the hydrant itself

Plotting the hydrant signs

In Parish Online Mapping, you can plot the locations of the signs, which indicate where the actual hydrant is.
  1. Log into your Parish Online Mapping account
  2. Pan and zoom to the location of a hydrant you want to add (hint: switch on the aerial photography to make it more accurate)
  3. In the left-hand Layer Control, scroll down to the "Community Resilience" collection and click it to expand it
  4. Click the Fire Hydrants (Collaborative)
  5. Hover over the cog icon (or right click) and select Add Feature
  6. Place a point on the map with a single click
  7. In the left-hand panel enter as much information as you can:
    1. Pipe diameter (mm) - this is the top number. If yours has an imperial measurement, enter that (we may convert it in the future)
    2. Distance from sign (metres) - this is the bottom number.
    3. Bearing from sign (degrees) - if you can see the actual hydrant cover in the ground, standing by the sign, use your phones compass to get a bearing. Enter this number (0-360). e.g. if it's due East, enter 90.
    4. Hydrant Reference - if you see an ID number then you can add it here
    5. Notes - any other notes relating to the hydrant.
  8. Upload or take a photo of the sign and the hydrant location as an attachment
  9. Click Save
The result will be a marker on the map, with a blue circle representing the distance, and if you've entered a bearing, it'll have a cone pointing towards the hydrant location.

Symbol Types

Hydrant with no numbers added

Hydrant with numbers added

Hydrant with numbers added and bearing cone