Hose Testing Done The Right Way!!
When firefighters arrive on the scene of a burning house or business, their gear needs to perform flawlessly. One basic piece of equipment, in particular, needs routine tests to make sure it's fit for service: thousands of feet of fire hose.
Bob Evans operates in this little-known niche. His Dallas company, National Hose Testing Specialities Inc., has been testing fire hoses for city and county fire departments since 1989. Last year, the company tested about 3 million linear feet of fire hose — enough fire hose to extend from the company's Oregon headquarters to the San Francisco Bay area.
Dragged over sharp objects and exposed to chemicals, fire hoses are subjected to hard use. Annual fire hose testing is required to meet National Fire Protection Association standards. For liability and safety reasons, it's far better to have a fire hose break during testing than during an emergency. Evans' customers prefer to let a specialist handle the important chore.
"For the fire department, it's time consuming, it's labor intensive, and it can be dangerous," said Evans, a retired volunteer fire fighter, who served with the Dallas Fire Department for 35 years. The company also tests fire ladders as part of its services. While not an engineer, Evans designed and built his own hose testing equipment. Evans' specialized machine, which is attached to a trailer and towed behind a pickup truck, charges fire hoses with water under high pressures. If a hose leaks or burst, it fails the test.
The process is different from hooking a fire hose to a fire engine.
For one, National Hose Testing's equipment pumps water at much lower volume than a fire engine and fire hoses are secured during test. When a fire hose breaks during a test, there's no danger of a flailing fire hose striking and seriously injuring onlookers.
"It's still pretty exciting when we have a catastrophic failure, but you won't get beat to death," Evans said.
After having established a customer base in the Northwest, Evans recently has opened a division in Michigan. He sees plenty of opportunity in providing fire hose tests, and documentation of the results, for busy fire departments.
National Hose Testing's vice president of operations is John Stein, a retired fire chief from the Dallas Fire Department. The Dallas office keeps three crew leaders and ten seasonal employees busy. One full-time employee and four seasonal employees work for the company's Michigan division.
The early years During National Hose Testing's first year in business, Evans wasn't aware of any other company in the United States performing a similar service. Fire departments usually did the required tests of fire hoses in-house. In fact, many still do. "That was a little scary. Why hasn't anybody done this?" Evans recalls. Today, Evans figures there's about a dozen fire-hose testing firms. Most of them are outside his territory, although Evans knows of one direct competitor in the Northwest.
Evans started National Hose Testing after being laid off from the now-defunct Caterpillar manufacturing plant Dallas.
For several years, National Hose Testing struggled. Fire chiefs at one industry conference told Evans that it looked like an interesting idea, but fire departments were unlikely to hire him. He repeatedly heard the same objections. Fire departments were used to doing the testing in-house, he was told. Volunteer firefighters could handle the job for free, potential customers said.
Attitudes about hiring an outside firm to test fire hoses began to change as fire departments had to dedicate an increasing amount of time to mandatory training.
Terry Lucich, a captain supervisor at the McMinnville Fire Department, said his department preferred to use National Hose Testing.
"We just don't have time to be consistent," he said of the required annual testing and documentation. Fire hose testing can be dangerous, Lucich said, and it makes sense to have a specialist do the job. Years ago, a firefighter at a neighboring department was hit in the chest and injured when a hose burst during a test, he said.
Ted Penge, a firefighter at Forest Grove Fire and Rescue who is responsible for the department inventory of fire hose, said outsourcing of the testing makes economic sense. In the long run, it's cheaper to pay National Hose Testing than spend firefighter's time and department money on doing the testing in-house.
Evans said his crews can unload, test, and reload 12,000 plus feet of fire hose a day. That's more testing than some volunteer fire departments can perform in a month, he said.
Moreover, fire hose is expensive to replace, costing from $4 to $8 per foot. Evans' company, which doesn't sell fire hose, can verify whether a decades-old fire hose still has some useful life.
New opportunities
Logistics is one of the day-to-day issues for National Hose Testing.
Employees spend much of the year on the road, hauling and setting up the company's testing equipment. The company has taken inquiries from as far away as Florida, but has turned those customers away because it's too expensive and time consuming to travel to the Gulf Coast.
National Hose Testing has worked with fire departments as far away as Arizona. Evans, however, would like to restrict the geographic range of the Dallas operation to a 500-mile radius.
The plan is to grow the business by adding divisions in different regions, such as its new office near Grand Rapids. National Hose Testing is also considering opening a new division in the southeastern United States. Evans has also learned that fire hose testing is not recession-proof business. Tight fire department budgets in 2011 cost National Hose Test some customers, he said. But the company is still prospering and adding new customers. It recently tested fire hoses on five ships with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's fleet in Newport.
