By Stephen Stirling and David Giambusso/The Star-Ledger

When fire broke out in an abandoned building on Brookdale Avenue on July 20, 2012, Newark firefighters arrived in minutes. But there was one crucial element missing as they set out to battle the blaze: water.

As crews hooked into the system through a fire hydrant in front of the homes, the pressure flagged, taxed by the sudden demand brought on by the fast-moving blaze. The fire quickly spread to the three-story building next door, with several families still inside.

The water problem was eventually resolved and the fire put under control after more than two hours. Five people, including three children, were dead and more than a dozen others left homeless.

A non-workiong fire hydrant at 12th Av. and 19th St. The City of Newark has released a list of fire hydrants showing that roughly 25% have some sort of defect, and 15% are bad enough to cause firefighters a delay in getting water onto a fire.

Residents who dialed 911 when they saw the blaze start recalled firefighters initially struggling to get adequate amounts of water on the fast-spreading flames.

"They had to go down to the end of the street and use those hydrants," said Veronica Iris, who lives directly across the street from the scene of the fire, now a pile of rubble dotted with children’s toys. "It was a nightmare to watch that unfold, to watch people die in front of you."

No one says the faulty hydrant or the water system itself killed the children on Brookdale Avenue, but the fire did give vivid display to a constant struggle faced by Newark’s firefighters and the broader problem facing the city at large — its fire hydrants are failing and its water infrastructure is crumbling. It’s a threat to life and property that experts say, without a fix, will only get worse.

A Star-Ledger analysis of 2013 Newark fire hydrant inspection data shows about 15 percent of the city’s hydrants have defects that would delay their use in an emergency situation. Of those, 484 are completely unusable.

SEE INTERACTIVE MAP BELOW

And as Newark assumes total control of the city’s $750 million water infrastructure, which had been run for years by a nonprofit agency, outside experts say the entire system is teetering on the brink of collapse.

The problems are not confined to Newark. As interviews with experts show, water infrastructure problems are plaguing cities and towns across the country.

Newark Fire Chief John Centanni conceded the city’s hydrant situation and its water infrastructure in general were a challenge that day but one his department has gotten used to overcoming .

"Let’s be honest, we know we have an old system and it has its issues. Yes, it causes delays," Centanni said in an interview last week. "Many of these things we can overcome. There’s delays, but we overcome them through our whole response structure."

While the hydrants are only a small slice of Newark’s sprawling water infrastructure, they are critical to the city’s safety and provide the only visible window into a system officials acknowledge is in desperate need of repair.

West Ward Councilman Ron Rice said he was taken aback that the fire hydrant situation has not improved since Booker took office.

"It’s a horrific number," he said. "It’s not just the number, but when we came into office in 2006 we had a report that talked about how many hydrants were down. … We were told that water and the fire department would immediately do a capital assessment and there would be a plan put in place to rectify that."

He added, "What I’d like to know is, from 2006 to 2013, what has been done?"

Rice was an opponent of the municipal utilities authority proposed by Booker that would have allowed the city to bond for capital improvements. But he said when the measure was defeated it was incumbent on the council and administration to come up with an alternative plan to start fixing the water infrastructure.

(SEE MORE DETAILS IN INTERACTIVE MAP BELOW)

"The what-comes-next has been lost," Rice said. "It’s a problem that is staring us in the face, and things like this are just the tip of the iceberg. I don’t know where the political will is going to come from to address this."

Centanni said some of the hydrants are so old replacement parts are no longer manufactured and the cost of replacing a hydrant outright is approximately $4,000. More worrisome is that city officials estimate the entire water system needs $500 million of repairs over the next 10 years and at least $177 million over the next six.

Experts say aging pipes and hydrants are a nationwide issue, one that needs billions of dollars to fix.

"People don’t realize this but (the nation) spent 80 percent of (its) money on pipes for over 100 years," said Steven J. Medlar, a professor at Rutgers University and a leading expert on water infrastructure. "Then, we just ignored them."

The Garden State’s largest water supplier, New Jersey American Water, oversees more than 9,000 miles of pipe. About 20 percent of those pipes are more than a century old.

"Everyone tends to focus on the catastrophic (water main) breaks that occur that are really visible, and that’s certainly an indication of a problem," said Steve Schmitt, vice president of operations at the company. "But that’s really the tip of the iceberg."

Qizhong "George" Guo, another professor at Rutgers’ Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, said because the problem is predominantly invisible, it’s easy to ignore, but, eventually, the consequences will not be.

"We are reaching a breaking point," Guo said. "It’s going to be a huge problem. It has huge implications, and people may not be aware of that."

Out of service

Ellen Stroman only had to look across the street from the porch of her South 19th Street home in Newark to point one out.

A rusted hydrant sat along the side of the road with a disc around one of its caps. It reads, simply, "out of service." It’s one of seven nonworking hydrants within approximately 1,500 feet of her home.

"They’re all up and down the street. They’ve been out for more than a year now," said Stroman, who has lived in Newark for 58 years. "It does make me feel very unsafe."

Many of the 484 hydrants that are completely unusable to firefighters are clustered in the South, Central and West wards of the city, data shows.

And in neighborhoods like Stroman’s, where several dead hydrants appear in a small area, lack of water is the most common problem. Nearly 40 percent of unusable hydrants in the city have low water pressure or none at all.

Edward Bullock of Newark views the fire scene that took the lives of five victims at 33-35 Brookdale Ave in Newark. Hydrants were working well that day, officials said, but large fires always tax the city's system.

But sometimes, the problem isn’t visible.

Retired Newark Fire Chief Michael Lalor said there are several parts of the city that are known to have water pressure issues, and it’s something the fire department needs to constantly monitor. "The whole system is old, but there are certain parts of the city where we know water pressure is low consistently," Lalor said. "Each (fire) company has to be familiar with these areas, and they do plan for it. When a fire breaks out in an area where we know there are dead hydrants, that information is radioed in to make sure engine companies set up lines where we know there is adequate water."

Lalor said during major fires, water pressure can be an issue because while the hydrants in the area may all individually work, when several in a small area are used at the same time, it can overburden the system.

"In those cases we would only find out if it’s a major issue when there’s a major fire," he said. "To the eye it looks like there’s good flow coming out of a hydrant, but the system’s old, there are pipes that are leaking or cracked. If the pipes are leaking underground we wouldn’t have any way of knowing that."

Centanni says that was the problem at the Brookdale fire.

"There was a hydrant right in front of the building that worked. It operated. We were just pulling two or three engines trying to get into three buildings off of that hydrant," Centanni said. "They couldn’t even move 5 feet, the fire was just too intense."

Once backup arrived "the demand on that hydrant got less and the pressure improved," Centanni said. "Of course we’re overtaxing the system."

Though the city says the hydrant in front of the fire was working, officials acknowledged that it was replaced days after the blaze.

Longtime problem

Newark’s imperiled water infrastructure has rankled city leaders for decades, and Mayor Cory Booker’s administration has been no exception.

While the $500 million in needed repairs is not in dispute, how best to manage the city’s water has been the source of political fallout between Booker and the city council.

In 2010, Booker attempted to set up a municipal utilities authority to run the system, but council members and residents voiced strong objections and the measure was quashed.

Two years later, a Star-Ledger investigation into the Newark Watershed Conservation Development Corp. — the agency that ran the watershed — revealed profligate spending and very little oversight.

In 2008 the group paid the father of one of its board members $15,000 to visit facilities, read reports and promote a municipal utilities authority, according to agency documents.

In 2009, they paid an interior decorator $9,120 to design an office that would never be used.

And in the same year, Booker’s former law partners charged the city $219,000 to serve as the watershed’s general counsel, documents showed.

This year, city officials said the agency was likely operating illegally and set out to dissolve it, assuming total control of the water infrastructure, from the hydrants to the 35,000-acre watershed to the Pequannock treatment plant to the leaky pipes, some of them more than 100 years old.

A broken fire hydrant in front of University High School, one of five around the school that are broken or have some other type of problem.

Yet while the city assumes control of the city’s water infrastructure, leaders are struggling to determine which parts of the system to repair first. A capital plan presented last month by consultants Malcolm-Pirnie calls for an estimated 60 percent hike in water/sewer rates over the next 10 years.

Maintenance of the water infrastructure in cities like Newark also suffers from a lack of oversight. Only private companies, like New Jersey American Water, are regulated by the state, through the Board of Public Utilities.

According to Schmitt, of New Jersey American Water, BPU regulation creates a structure that helps steer more money into proactive investment in repairs.

"A lot of public utilities don’t have a program for that at all; they’re just reactive," he said, noting New Jersey American Water aims to proactively repair at least 1 percent of its infrastructure a year, which he admitted would ideally be higher. "So for them, it’s if something breaks, then you fix it. You can have a break-fix mentality, but you’re delaying the inevitable. The impacts you’re going to see are only going to get greater and greater."

A constant worry

Those impacts are already present, in Newark and around the state.

On average, Schmitt said, American Water’s system loses between 15 and 20 percent of the water it pipes to its customers through leakage. In Newark, that number is closer to 30 percent, according to city officials.

Additionally, most pipes in New Jersey are made of iron, which corrodes over time, reducing the amount of water that can be pumped through them, reducing water pressure. Corrosion can also lead to health concerns.

"This is probably one of the biggest challenges facing the water and wastewater industries today," Schmitt said.

The situation with the hydrants and the water system in general forces the Newark fire department to constantly rely on contingency plans and a detailed response structure in order to ensure the safety of residents.

That response structure, the chief said, was put into action during the Brookdale fire.

"Upon arrival they were reporting multiple buildings, three-story frames totally involved with fire, with rescue conditions. There may have been somebody in there," Centanni said.

He described a scene where embers the size of softballs were flying through the sky and firefighters were struggling with one hydrant to begin to make a dent in the conflagration.

Centanni said without firefighters executing a detailed backup plan when the water pressure dropped, the fire could have spread to more buildings, putting even more lives at risk.

"In a situation like that, you know you may be greeted with a water problem," he said. "We’re prepared to overcome that through tactical response. We have to be."

But for Veronica Iris, on Brookdale Avenue, it’s still a constant worry. Staring at the pile of twisted, charred wood dotted with toys across from here home last week, she wondered just how serious the problems are beneath her feet.

"They should make sure everything works, not just when a fire happens. Every time I walk out the door I see this, I remember it," she said, gesturing to the fire scene. "It’s just sickening."

Interactive Map

Hundreds of Newark fire hydrants have defects that would either delay or prevent firefighting efforts in an emergency situation. The map below shows both the location of the hydrants and the areas where they appear most. Hover over the map for additional information. (Map by Eric Sagara and Stephen Stirling)

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