09/30/2025
I am absolutely humbled and honored that the Marshall County Fire School in West Virginia asked me to teach Pumping 101 for them this past weekend! What a great organization and mission - using training to change the fire service, one firefighter at a time!
It was a two day class (Saturday and Sunday), which of course started with classroom stuff. The students asked good questions and there was good, topic related conversation. While trying to explain hose coefficients in the friction loss formula, one of the students helped me out by suggesting that we refer to it as a correction factor - and boy howdy! That clicked! I love that! Thanks, Jeff, for that!
Saturday afternoon, we went to do hydrant work. The plan was:
- forward lay, pump a portable gun
- share water with a second pumper, going intake to intake, using a technique called dual pumping
So we did, and established 1,000 GPM flow between two portable guns. Pretty respectable.
We had a group confab and discussed what we had going on. They said they wanted to flow more water. I pointed out that when we laid in, a four way hydrant valve was placed on the hydrant, and we now have two options available to us:
- have another pumper hook in and boost the pressure at the hydrant, or
- stretch more supply line to the second hydrant to hook into OR&W E352; doing this, with the intake to intake line already in place, will give us an above ground loop, which will help the two engines share water from both hydrants.
The group opted for the above ground loop. So, we set it up.
Aaand that’s when we found that the second hydrant’s riser was cracked. Copious water was flowing up from underground…. When we shut down the hydrant, the water stopped, which relatively confirms our theory. Proper notifications were made, and we were allowed to continue the drill, but only with the first hydrant.
So, the theory that we should always have backup options available was proven once again. At least we’d already set up for it!
Water was flowing again, just like before. Then, we hooked the third pumper in to the four way valve.
The challenge: this pumper has no LDH discharge. How do we pump the 5” into the four way valve to boost hydrant pressure?
The solution: we pumped three 2-1/2” lines into a triamese valve, and it worked like a charm! That engine is a 1250 GPM pumper, and it pumped 1500 GPM to the “scene” by boosting the water pressure from the hydrant. The motor was at nearly full throttle, and simply ran out of horsepower. Not a bad problem to have - it still pumped more than its rating!
Sunday morning we met at the drafting site, a boat launch on the Ohio River. Given that we were conducting a training exercise vs operating in a real emergency, we were very mindful to keep a lane open so folks could still use the boat launch. And the fine folks who were using the boat launch were not only appreciative of our effort to keep it open, they were very supportive of the training we were doing!
First, we had everyone practice a technique called burp drafting, which is where we recirculate water at a high speed to pull a prime. This technique is excellent to use the event the pump’s primer malfunctions. Then we started our scenario.
The drafting engine was to send water to the second engine which in turn would relay pump to the third engine which would pump the portable monitors. They burp primed and sent water. We were flowing 900 GPM. Then, they used a siphon to perform a pressurized prime on a second suction line. We increased the flow to 1200 GPM.
The drafting engine was nearly at full throttle, and the vacuum guage was at 25” Hg; something was amiss… Time to start trouble shooting.
The seaweed clogged the strainers. That’ll do it every time!
We started again, and this time we were unable to get a prime, on either side. Turns out both intake valves were leaking air due to the valve seat wearing out. Ok, this happens. The problem? It was nearly time to be done with class.
If this were a real world situation, we absolutely would’ve pulled that engine out and put in another and tried again.
Everyone pitched in and cleanup took less than thirty minutes. I cannot overstate how great this group was to work with! Everyone wanted to learn, and I’m grateful to have helped plant some seeds for their professional growth in the fire service!
