Once you’ve considered the risks and potential damage that can come from experiencing fire in a rural or remote area, it’s time to start planning your own fire pond. If you live in an area where there are several neighbors close by, it may even be worth chipping in together on a single fire pond built in a central location. It’ll split the cost, help everyone breathe a little bit easier, and may even lower your insurance premiums.
Factors to Consider When Planning Your Pond:
- Size. It’s probably simplest to check with your local fire department and ask them to estimate how much water you would need to save your home/barn/shed during a fire. They should be able to calculate an accurate number with a few measurements and a description of your property. Plan to build a fire pond that will hold about 120% of the recommended volume.
- Freezing depths in winter months. Plan your pond to be deep enough to maintain a good volume of liquid underneath the ice even in midwinter.
- Emergency overflows. In times of heavy precipitation, like a storm, flooding can be a real concern within a fire pond. While too much water doesn’t exactly sound like a bad thing, flooding the pond’s banks and any installed equipment can cause havoc. An extra storage pond, known as an attenuation pond, provides extra room for flood waters in these cases. Other emergency overflows can come in the form of raised pumps or drains to help lower the water level once it reaches a certain point.
- Location. Deciding where your pond will be placed is also a critical part of the design process. If built within a community, the pond should be within a reasonable distance of all the houses it intends to serve. It should also be easy to access by the vehicles that are going to pull water from it. Helicopters will need airspace in order to pump the water into buckets and tanks, and firetrucks will need wide, usable roads.
Similarly, to building a farm pond, building a fire retention pond requires a lot of planning. The amount of water you will need to maintain depends on the size of your property. One 2,000-square-foot home, for example, will require more than 8,000 gallons of water to suppress. Barn fires require more than 25,000 gallons. Check your home measurements to calculate the water volume you will need for your retention pond. Though you may be hesitant to build one, the sole purpose of your pond does not have to be fire retention. Any pond, decorative, agricultural, recreational or otherwise, can double as a water source in the event of a fire. A well-placed swimming pool, aquaculture farm, or fishing pond can provide all the water you need. Simply set up a dry hydrant to provide fire retention access. A dry hydrant is a piece of PVC pipe that connects to the water source. It allows firefighters to tap into the fire retention pond and use the water for wildfire management. Some rural fire departments will require dry hydrants in order to pump water from your water source. Others will have floating pumps they can place on the water’s surface. Check with your local fire department for water pump guidelines, but here are some general requirements:
- The hydrant should be well marked and located near an all-weather road to allow pumper trucks to hook up to it.
- The hose connection must be 2 feet above the ground.
- Intake pumps should be located 2 feet above the bottom of the pond and 2 feet below the anticipated low water level.
- Pumping up higher distances requires more power, and at a certain height, is nearly impossible; the total vertical height of pipe from intake to outlet shouldn’t exceed 18 feet, with shorter heights preferred.
A dry hydrant will need to be inspected regularly in order to maintain its ability to function. Debris, vegetation, or sediment can clog the intake screen, and may require manual removal or back-flushing.
