Welcome to the home page for DC Wood Consulting. Thank you for coming here. This page is my chance to introduce myself and my firm, and I feel a story is a good way for you to understand who I am and what I do.
The following story does not involve any math or engineering terms; it is just a basic human story. As you read it, just go with the flow. My approach will be clearer after you have finished it.
The Broken Hydrant
I was working late one summer evening a couple of years ago. It was after 5:00 PM, and as I walked over to the copy machine, I looked out the 3rd story office window and saw a geyser of water coming from an apparently broken fire hydrant. This was in a midtown area, in a large Midwestern city. There were no buildings near the street corner by the hydrant, only parking lots. Being on the third floor, I had a good view of the street corner and the surrounding area.
The water was shooting straight up, a 6 inch thick fountain, under high pressure. The water reached the second story level, and it was colored brown. The enormous water flow was really purging the lines of sediment.
I was about to look up the phone number for the city water repair department, when the first blue trucks arrived. It was only about 15 minutes after I first saw the break, so the city water department must have known about the broken hydrant fairly quickly. Perhaps they were monitoring flow meters, or someone called them right after the break.
The next stages are illustrative of how good intentions are not enough to guarantee excellence.
The first few trucks included about 6 workers. They looked the situation over, and then moved back to the trucks, apparently to call for backup and/or more specialized equipment.
The workers spread out in the surrounding area, searching the ground. After three or four more trucks arrived, a team of two workers had started opening metal street level covers. They slid a long metal rod down into the opening in the street, one at a time. I realized they were looking for a shut off valve for the water main that fed the hydrant. While this was going on, about 6 workers stood and watched the stream of water shoot into the air. By now, it had purged the line of sediment and had turned white. I don’t know how much water had been lost; easily tens of thousands of gallons.
The repair effort started to bog down 45 minutes after the crews arrived. I watched, fascinated, my tasks forgotten. The team with the long rod had set it down, and was back at a truck, perhaps on the radio again. After a while, there was a new worker on the scene with a rolled up set of blueprints. He was dressed differently, so I guessed was he was a supervisor or manager. A crowd of about 10 gathered around the hood of the supervisor’s car and studied the plans. The valve shut off crew picked up the long rod, and others fanned out looking at the ground. While each crew member was focused, this effort appeared aimless, like ants going in all directions. The plans were put away.
Another 20 minutes went by. They tried 5 holes in the street with the shut off rod, to no avail. The water was still shooting in the air, running down the street, to a storm drain I suppose. I couldn’t see where it was going; I hoped that it was not flowing into the basement of one of the nearby buildings.
After about an hour, another three trucks arrived. One had a medium sized crane. About half of the on site crews worked with a 4 foot long pipe, with a clamp arrangement on one end and a flange with bolt holes on the other. It would seem as if they were going to ‘cap’ the geyser like a wildcat oil well. Since the pipe had broken flush with the ground, they had to dig close to the spraying water, to expose a portion of the original pipe. The crane moved in, and the new pipe was held straight up and down, clamp end down, next to the geyser. The crane moved back, and the new pipe was right over the broken hydrant stump. The water was now flowing up out of the broken pipe, then straight up through the new pipe.
Three workers worked the pipe clamps, and got the new pipe connected below ground. I now saw that the new pipe had some kind of valve built in the middle. They crew closed the valve, and the water was finally shut off.
I got home late that night; I finished my work another day, but the time I spent observing was instructive. I’m sure the water department employees worked as hard as they could, but this method could have been improved. Here are the observed steps:
| 1. | First response: good | 25 minutes |
| 2. | Look for valve in street: so-so | 35 minutes |
| 3. | Wait for supervisor: too long | 15 minutes |
| 4. | Read plans and search again: pretty quick | 15 minutes |
| 5. | Order special crew: should have been unnecessary | 60 minutes |
| 6. | Mount the special pipe: slow due to water pressure | 45 minutes |
| Total time elapsed: | 3 hours 15 minutes |
What improvements would have helped?
- Correct the plans after the previous street paving, and raise buried valves up to the surface of the pavement.
- If the plans were the first thing looked at, off site with radioed directions to the valve shut off crew, perhaps the water flow could have been stopped in an hour.
- There were too many workers present for the repair. Never more than half were actively working at any one time, and for long stretches, no one was working while they waited on a piece of equipment or information.
- If the first response had included the emergency pipe repair crew, the pipe could have been capped more quickly even if the valve was not found Not doing this was a management failure.
- Practice would have helped the crews with speed, and testing the valves would have made sure they all worked and the plans were correct.
The workers seemed to be individually competent. This was backbreaking work, and when busy, they were scrambling. The facts are that the activities did not result in a rapid, efficient, cost effective solution.
One word about technology: today, we could have made the plans available electronically via a laptop and internet connections, but that would not have helped here, as the plans were incorrect and the pipe clamp crew was delayed in arriving. Technology is not a panacea, and best practices are not obtained by new gadgets and more money. The keys are planning, practice, and good information, all management activities.
How many pipe breaks occur in the summer in a typical city? Ten, twenty, fifty? How many situations occur in industry that fit this model? This kind of issue happens hundreds of times a year, and probably where you work. We can call these problems one-of-a-kind, and we say we all scrambled to fight the fire or solve the problem, but did we do our best? Excellence is all about quick action, but it must be preceded by thoughtful planning and good information.
