NEW ORLEANS — Kriston Keller spent Wednesday trying to figure out what's next.
A day earlier, fire spread from an abandoned house next door to her apartment in the 1700 block of Gov. Nicholls Street and left every inch of her place soaked and damaged by smoke and flames.
It's nowhere she and her children can live.
"I commend the firemen, because they came in a nice amount of time," she said.
Keller and others in the neighborhood questioned why a fire hydrant at the corner, a few yards away from Keller's front door, sat untouched as the NOFD raced to put out the two-alarm fire.
“This particular hydrant on the corner was not hooked up,” Keller said.
NOFD Superintendent Tim McConnell said the lock on top of the hydrant was not able to be taken off Tuesday, forcing firefighters to move to other hydrants in the area.
"The hydrant was functional, but we weren't able to get water out of it because the locking top had a problem,” McConnell said Wednesday.
It's working again after being tested, he said.
The NOFD regularly sends out crews to check the 15,500 fire hydrants around town every year. Word is sent to the Sewerage & Water Board for repairs made when one is broken.
You can tell when a fire hydrant isn't working by a disk placed on it.
“At any given time, it's less than about half of one percent of fire hydrants that might be broken,” McConnell said of the hydrants in the city that are not in service.
But firefighters say having to find a hydrant that does work when one turns out to be broken is something that can take up precious time in a situation where every second counts.
“That's not right. It's not right,” Keller said. “It's not right at all. What if I had died up in here?”