Despite fire hose and hydrant coupler standardization efforts that are at least years old, [ 1 ] there remain significant areas in Canada , the United States , and Mexico that use fire hose and hydrant threads and other couplings that are incompatible with those used by neighboring fire departments. This is notable because the first fire hydrant was invented by Manhattan fire fighter George Smith in , making these devices years old.
These incompatibilities have led to well-documented loss of life and buildings, including the Great Boston fire of , the Great Baltimore Fire in , and the Oakland firestorm of As of , San Francisco still maintains fire hydrants with a size and thread that are incompatible [ 3 ] with those used by most or all other nearby fire departments that would respond in mutual aid conditions, such as occurred during the Loma Prieta earthquake.
As a result of the Boston fire, the International Association of Fire Engineers designed and published a fire hydrant coupling standard. As a result of the Baltimore fire, the National Fire Protection Association formed a committee, and in published its first report on the subject, which would eventually become an official standard, NFPA This standard specified that each fire hydrant have one large diameter pumper a.
During at least two periods, specialized thread-adjusting tool sets were developed to enable fire departments using diameters and threads similar to but incompatible with the NFPA standard to convert them to the national standard. One of the reasons for the incompatibilities is that there are three U. Note: the straight iron pipe thread is a temporary connection and seals with a gasket, just like garden hose threads and fire hose threads, and is distinct from tapered iron pipe thread NPT , which is a permanent connection sealed by the threads in conjunction with pipe dope or teflon tape wrapped around the threads.
The connection uses a gasket to seal, and is temporary. The following hose and coupler combinations are used in U. Standard length is 10 feet. Normal flat hoses can't be used for suction because they would collapse; instead, these hoses are made of hard rubber with internal metal reinforcement or corrugated scalloped plastic. Additionally, suction hose requires the use of suction gaskets to prevent air from entering, which are not used on other types of hoses, which use gaskets that seal with the addition of water pressure and sometimes leak when not enough pressure is present.
