watering the river

[topaz]

slow day for the Bedford FD?, originally uploaded by qwrrty.

My usual route to work takes me over the Concord River between Carlisle and Bedford. On Friday I was enjoying a particularly lovely ride as I crossed the bridge, when I noticed that there was a Bedford fire engine parked at the boat launch... watering the river.

Here they are. See? Look! There's the water! Going into the river!

Any hints what might be going on here? The closest thing I could think of was some kind of water-laundering scheme, but I got hung up on the details. I'm open to ideas here.

Comments

[sconstant.livejournal.com]

My guess is that the fire engine has some mechanism that allows it to take water in and pump it out at a high pressure, and that mechanism is being flushed out or calibrated or tested, and that it makes more sense to do this there than from a hydrant into a gutter.

[harimad.livejournal.com]

Testing the water pumps for fire extinguishment. It's really fun to watch fire boats do this because they look like fountains, spouting water in several directions as they test both intake and outtake.

[donnad.livejournal.com]

I'm with what the first person who responded said, flushing and recalibrating the pumping equipment.

[keyne.livejournal.com]

Darn, I liked Tim's theory better :-)

[harimad.livejournal.com]

It's entirely possible that whatever gets sucked into the pipe is filtered out early on, otherwise there'd be roasted fish at every marine fire. Does that count as water-laundering?

[khedron.livejournal.com]

I hear ya. Here's one of mine, from NYC:

(http://ottemann.haggisnet.org/gallery/nyc-barges/IMG_1742)

Practice

[baronet.livejournal.com]

It might be the fire department practicing with their equipment
A: in case they ever need to use it, and
B: because it's fun.