Doesn't work: Thousands of fire hydrants such as this downtown San José pump haven't worked for years. Costa Rica needs 10,000 fire hydrants, but it has only 5,000 and half of them function poorly, according to the Firefighters Corps.

Harmony Reforma | Tico Times

Fighting fires will soon become easier, thanks to a new bill to fix an alarming shortage of working fire hydrants.

Lawmakers voted yesterday to make fire hydrants a “public good,” to be installed and maintained by water providers and funded by the state.

Fire hydrants have been abandoned for decades because no one is legally responsible for their care. Costa Rica needs 10,000 fire hydrants, but it has only 5,000 and half of them function poorly, said Héctor Chaves, director of the Firefighters' Corps.

“It's almost a national emergency,” said National Liberation Party (PLN) lawmaker Fernando Sánchez. “We are sending (firefighters) into a war without weapons.”

Under the new bill, public and private water providers will pay for the hydrants by charging their clients a small tax, fixed by the state body ARESEP. The Firefighters Corps will help decide where to put the hydrants.

Fires destroy some 1,100 houses every year, often for lack of water, Chaves said. Two trucks, each with a thousand gallons of water, usually respond to a fire alarm. But because it takes a thousand gallons a minute to fight a fire, their water runs out after just two minutes, said Jorge Marrero, who directs the Firefighters' Corps in the Central Pacific and southern zones.

Firefighters then turn to hydrants or rivers, or they call for another fire truck. Often, the closest hydrant is several blocks away and has little or no water.

A working fire hydrant can spew an average of 400 gallons per minute for up to two hours, Marrero said.

The National Insurance Institute (INS), which funds the Firefighters Corps, used to install and maintain fire hydrants, said Alvaro Escalante, who was corps director in the 1980s. But INS could not afford to keep pace with the growing population density.

Dozens of firefighters drove cranes and trucks to the doors of the Legislative Assembly yesterday, and they sounded sirens periodically for hours as lawmakers debated the bill.

The bill will become law once it is passed in a second vote and signed by the president.