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Water Supplies
Add a Hydrant to a Structure
Add a Hydrant to a Structure

Learn how easy it is to create and add water supplies to your preplans

Jon Kern avatar
Written by Jon Kern
Updated over a week ago

Water supplies are easy to add and can be designated for use in multiple nearby structures or preplans. The types of water supplies supported include:

  • Wet or Dry Hydrants

  • Draft Site

  • Tanker

  • Water Tank

  • Other

NOTE WELL: water supplies only have to be created one time in Blazemark, and can be "associated" to many preplans, and even across neighboring Fire Department organizations! Your organization "owns" the Water Supplies you create in terms of being able to edit the details. (Or to delete.)

In general, there are two common approaches to create water supplies:

  • Simply add water supplies individually as you preplan out your structures.

  • Add 100s or 1000s at once for the entire org via bulk importing hydrant data from a spreadsheet -- typical for larger municipal departments

The choice is yours as we want Blazemark to be as flexible as you need it to be. We suggest you try out various ways to see what makes the most sense for you and your organization.

How to Create a Water Supply

You can add water supplies during creation of the preplan:

  • When you have added a structure, you can create new water supplies that you want associated to the structure and it will automatically "attach" the two together

  • Or, you could do the same thing after you have created a preplan and maybe have another preplan nearby that can also use the water supply you created earlier.

Draft Water Supplies can require a little more precision in mapping. Learn more from this article (includes a video) "Adding a Draft Water Supply"

Associate Water Supply to Structure

Just what does "Associating Water Supplies" mean?

When viewing a preplan/structure, you will see the "Add/Remove" button.
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You can select which water supplies appear by default as the first options for getting water to a given preplan or structure. Though a structure might have 5 nearby hydrants, maybe 1 of those hydrants is not as well-suited to being used for that structure. Therefore, you would only associate 4 of the hydrants to that building. (Maybe the 5th hydrant is useful for a structure down the street.)

Water Supply Distance

By default, the distance is a straight line measurement. Learn more about custom hose lay distances here. 

Understanding Our "Behind the Scenes" Design

This graphic attempts to show the relationship between preplans, structures and water supplies that have been attached (and therefore show hose lay distances):

Import Water Supplies

See the article on "Bulk Import Water Supply Data"
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Water Supplies and Neighboring Blazemark Orgs

Water Supplies are visible to other neighboring organizations. This makes it so that both organizations do not have to enter the same Water Supply.

Think:

  • Hydrants that are located along the boundaries of two fire departments.

  • Draft sites on bodies of water that are located in between two fire districts.

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