Why can’t we build fire hydrants around areas where it is susceptible to wild fires?
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Wildfires occur in places where it gets dry. By definition, there is very little water around those places (at least during times when wildfires occur). So you’d have to pipe it in from somewhere – probably somewhere far away. And you can’t just have a single pipe to one location in a forest. You’d need fire hydrants covering the entire forest for them to be useful, because fires can start or spread anywhere. That means many many miles of plumbing, pumps, etc. Basically you’d have to build a city-level water system underneath a whole forest. That’s just not feasible or cost-effective.
The best solution would be water basins where helicopters could refill and double benifit would be wildlife could drink. Thing is, forests need to burn sometimes. There’s no way you could put in enough pipe to do fire hydrants that could protect maybe only 300 yards around them
The areas most susceptible to wildfires are undeveloped hills and mountains. Those areas are extremely vast. Last year alone, in only California, 6000 square miles burned. That’s a tiny fraction of the area that could have burned. Underground pipes would be extremely difficult, as much of that is going to be mountains or rock. And above ground pipes would be rather prone to breaking or tampering. Between the vast area to be covered and the difficulty of laying and maintaining pipes, a project like that would be incomprehensibly expensive and damaging to the environment.
The hydrant isn’t the only part of it. The other, more important part, is the underground pipes that bring the water. Unfortunately, as the name might suggest, “*wild*fires” don’t occur in many places where there’s significant piping, and installing the pipes would be worse for the environment than the fires themselves.
You’d have to run high pressure pipes everywhere in the forested areas, which means digging big trenches everywhere there are forests. It would destroy the forests as we know them today and cost a crap ton of money
Wouldn’t you need water already piped to that area before being able to put in hydrants? Most wildfires start out in the backcountry.
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