By Collin Binkley
The Columbus Dispatch
COLUMBUS, Ohio — Some ran splashing through it, others jumped into the spray, and many just sat in the street as water poured over them from a gushing fire hydrant.
“It cools you off when you really need to be cooled off,” said Winston Sewell, 8, who went with his mother and 7-year-old sister to a Near East Side block that Columbus turned into a water park for a few hours yesterday afternoon.
The scene was the same at three other hydrants that city officials opened as relief from what Mayor Michael B. Coleman called the “oppressive” heat that has blanketed the city this week.
City officials stopped opening hydrants for recreation four years ago, fearing it would lead to people opening hydrants on their own, which is illegal.
But when Coleman asked city officials this week why they no longer opened the spouts, no one gave him a good enough reason, he said. So he told them to open a hydrant in each quarter of the city for an afternoon.
“This is to cool temperatures off, and tempers,” Coleman said after accompanying a crowd of about 60 youngsters into the spray from a hydrant outside the Beatty Recreation Center on N. Ohio Avenue.
Parents who stood outside the spray’s reach — and many who embraced the water with their children — were grateful that the city renewed the practice.
“They should do it more often,” said Winston’s mother, Mary Lewis, who lives on 21st Street. “A lot of pools around here have closed, and that’s terrible.”
One of those pools is just a few blocks from the hydrant on the South Side that was wrenched open yesterday near Lincoln Park Elementary School. The Lincoln pool was one of five that was shut down last year and remained closed this year.
“Some of the pools were built 40, 50 years ago, and they haven’t been maintained,” Coleman said.
Linda Vannoy, who brought her two grand-nephews to the South Side hydrant, can’t afford to go frequently to the Marion-Franklin pool. The hydrant was a free alternative to combat high temperatures and smog, which has aggravated her grand-nephews’ breathing problems.
“It keeps the kids cool, and they’ll sleep better,” she said.
City officials didn’t know how much water spewed from the hydrants during the 31/2 hours they flowed yesterday. An open hydrant typically releases more than 1,000 gallons per minute, but fire officials equipped the hydrants with special caps yesterday that turned the firehose force into a 20-foot sprinkler.
Although some might be concerned about the costs of letting the water run, Vannoy pointed out that she paid her taxes, too.
“Why can’t they enjoy a little water?” she said.
Fire officials turned the hydrants off at 4 p.m. as the hottest day of the week neared its end. Temperatures are expected to stay in the 80s next week, but Coleman said there’s no plan to reopen the hydrants.
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