BAY CITY

— Come next year, Bay City fire hydrants may have a new splash of color as a means of identifying each one’s quality.

Both the city’s fire department and water distribution department are seeking to color code the hydrants based on water outflow. If put into effect, the large steamer cap on the front of each hydrant in residential areas will be blue for “very good,” green for “good,” orange for “marginally adequate” and red for “inadequate.”

A hydrant is considered inadequate if it expels less than 500 gallons of water a minute, said Bay City Fire Department Interim Chief Karey Prieur.

“That wouldn’t help us out a bit,” he said. “We wouldn’t be able to fight a fire with 500 gallons of water per minute.”

The four colors and their significance are recommended by the Quincy, Mass.-based National Fire Protection Association. The ideal classification for a hydrant is one that expels 1,500 gallons or more per minute.

“Marking or coloring of fire hydrants is a common practice in several jurisdictions or communities,” said Chad Duffy, senior fire protection specialist for NFPA. “Keep in mind this is only a recommended practice and not a code or standard.

Bay City has 1,441 hydrants, according to Mark Vanderberg, supervisor of the water distribution department. He could not state how many of those are considered inadequate at this time.

“It’s not very many,” he said. “They’re in isolated areas throughout the city.

“All the information is entered into our hydraulics model,” he continued. “That determines the theoretical flow out of the fire hydrants. There was a study done in 2004 and we’ve been making substantial progress in correcting a lot of those low-flow areas.”

Vanderberg said the model is housed at City Hall, which was significantly damaged last October by fire and about 20,000 gallons of water used to extinguish the fire.

“Due to the fire at City Hall, the program is not available right now to run those numbers.”

The majority of inadequate hydrants are located on dead end streets, due to water only coming from one direction instead of two, Vanderberg said.

“Just because it’s a dead end street, though, doesn’t mean the water main doesn’t go through,” he added.

If firefighters respond to a scene without an adequate hydrant, they search for the next-nearest one until finding a suitable one, Prieur said. He added that when they are dispatched to a call, they have the two closest hydrants marked beforehand.

“We have a primary and a secondary hydrant system,” Prieur said. “Sometimes we go and they don’t work and we have to go to plan B.

“If all else fails, we’d have to shuttle water, but we’ve never had to do that. We’re very fortunate in this city with the amount of hydrants. We have a very good water delivery system.”

Zac Van Wagner, 33, who lives in the 1300 block of dead end Jane Street, said he has no misgivings that the fire hydrant near his front yard will quell any structure fire near his home. He said he has seen the hydrant expel water when it was undergoing maintenance.

“To be honest, it shot quite a bit across the street,” he said.

“I feel fairly confident it would do the job,” he continued. “I feel pretty secure. Hopefully, I don’t — and my neighbors don’t — have to experience the loss of having a house or structure on fire.”

Making the hydrants adequate and combating fires is the top priority, but color coding them can suffice in the meantime.

“The idea of color coding hydrants is to readily identify not so much low-flow, but the high pressure hydrants,” Vanderberg said. “If more flow is needed, without referring back to maps, they can visually look in the field and know this comes off a larger transmission main. It’s just a quick visual check to see the available flow at any hydrant in the city.”

All maintenance of the hydrants is handled by the water distribution department, whose employees typically flush hydrants in the spring.

“We winterize them as well,” Vanderberg said. “We check to make sure there’s not water in the barrels so they don’t freeze over the winter. That’s usually done towards the start of November.”

Hydrants throughout the city bear uni-color stickers on their tops serving as indicators that a hydrant has been winterized.

“The colors change year to year so we know we’re not confusing them with previous years,” Vanderberg said.

The department is currently in the process of putting a fresh coat of red paint on all the hydrants, having recently completed the task on 538 hydrants on the West Side. The last time they were painted was about 15 years ago, when they were all switched from yellow to red.

The color coding system won’t begin until the painting itself is complete, Vanderberg said.

“It probably won’t be until next year,” he said. “There’s no sense in color coding if they all needed to be painted anyway.”