ASHLAND — If you see a freshly painted fire hydrant in Ashland these days, thank a member of the Ashland Noon Lions Club.
Club members are continuing their summer initiative to repaint 40 of the city’s nearly 1,500 hydrants.
Tom Rohr, an active member of the Noon Lions Club, said it’s a summertime volunteer project.
“Probably the worst part about painting a hydrant is getting it scraped off and prepped to paint,” he said. “When we started, we had no idea how many fire hydrants there actually were.”
Teams of two club members tackle hydrants during their spare time. One person is responsible for scraping the old paint off of the hydrant, while the other covers it in a fresh coat.
Even though the fire hydrants are being painted red, they were previously painted in different colors according to a color coding system.
Each color represented the main size underneath each hydrant, giving fire fighters an idea to how much water they have access to and how much pressure the water exerts while being used.
Now that the hydrants are being repainted, a new coding system is being utilized. Ashland Fire Chief Richard Anderson explained the color coding system.
“The fire hydrants are currently being painted all red,” Anderson said. “We’ll go back and paint the bonnet, the top part of the hydrant, a different color to signify the hydrants rate of gallons-per-minute.”
“They’re doing a fantastic job! We’ve talked about this in the city for quite some time.”
Rohr said the Ashland community has welcomed their efforts.
“This project has been pretty well accepted by the community,” said Rohr. “I had one guy talking to me while I was painting and he said obligingly, ‘I’ll put off cutting the grass until tomorrow.'”
Members of the Noon Lions Club are used to being thanked by community members passing by. Rohr did recount a humorous occasion when someone took action against the volunteers.
“Last year, someone called the police on one of our volunteers and reported a ‘suspicious person’ messing with a fire hydrant,” Rohr said. “Everything got straightened out, of course. It was funny.”
The Noon Lions Club will continue repainting fire hydrants through July and into the month of August.
