With the fire department just a few miles away, a pond across the street and a swimming pool next door, Paul and Janet Swanson felt confident their $500,000 Hawthorn Woods home would be well protected in the event of a fire.
But their confidence was shattered recently as they stood with their two young children and watched their 4,500-square-foot colonial burn to the ground due to a shortage of firefighting equipment and water in the posh suburb, which has no fire hydrants or water lines.
“(The fire department) just simply had no water, so we watched the entire thing burn to the ground,” said Janet Swanson, who questioned a firefighter at the scene. “I said, `I don’t understand why you’re not spraying water on it.’ He said, `Ma’am, we have none.’ “
According to the Lake County Public Works Department, the Swansons are among approximately 30,000 Lake County homeowners who live in areas without fire hydrants and who rely on private wells for their water supply. This puts them at the mercy of fire department tanker trucks, which shuttle in up to 6,000 gallons of water and can suck water out of ponds through “dry hydrants” when supplies run out.
The same goes for several thousand residents in booming McHenry, Will and Kane Counties, where subdivisions are rapidly going up in rural areas that have no fire hydrants. As in Lake County, homeowners in those areas rely on tanker trucks and mutual-aid agreements among neighboring fire departments for protection.
Normally, the system works, fire officials said, and areas without fire hydrants are assisted by tanker trucks from nearby fire departments if needed. The problem, they said, is that a recent Wednesday night was not a normal night for fires in Lake County, as about two dozen homes caught fire, many of them struck by lightning.
Among the unfortunate were the Swansons, who fire officials said were victims of a series of incidents of bad luck sparked by “a mini-act of God.”
They said the lightning fire at the Swansons’ home, on Greenbriar Lane, which started about 9 p.m., was the fifth of 20 calls for service in 20 minutes. To make matters worse, lightning fires in nearby Lake Zurich and Wauconda tied up tanker trucks that normally could have helped in Hawthorn Woods.
“This is a fire department’s nightmare–not to be able to have the resources needed to fight this kind of fire,” said Chief Lewis Landry of the Countryside Fire Protection District, which covers Hawthorn Woods. “Some communities were left with one engine to protect their whole town.”
Landry said Hawthorn Woods has several dry hydrants that are connected to small ponds through underground pipes. But he said the fire department couldn’t access the dry hydrants because they didn’t have a tanker available.
“It was a whole disastrous situation because of the weather,” Landry said.
But blaming the weather isn’t enough for the Swansons, who believe the village needs to be better prepared to handle multiple fires. The couple, who moved to Hawthorn Woods from Elmhurst seven years ago, blame the village infrastructure, not the firefighters, who they said arrived promptly and did all they could considering their lack of resources.
The Swansons, who say they pay $10,000 a year in property taxes, are thinking about moving away.
“We don’t exactly feel safe,” Janet Swanson said from her mother’s home in Deerfield. “I’ve got two kids. We were lucky this time.”
According to the state fire marshal’s office and the Lake County Planning and Development Department, there are no state or county laws requiring fire hydrants.
Municipalities are free to pass their own ordinances. Long Grove, for example, requires developers who want to build new subdivisions to install dry hydrants.
Rudy Parker, a spokesman for the Lake County Public Works Department, said his agency only monitors the supply of water, which he believes is adequate.
“By far, the greater part of Lake County is well served with water,” said Parker, adding the county has taken steps in recent years to increase the water supply due to rapid growth.
For example, Parker said, several years ago, a new system that pumps water from Lake Michigan to Vernon Hills was set up, providing water for Libertyville, Mundelein, Gurnee, Grayslake, Lake Bluff and Round Lake.
Communities such as Hawthorn Woods and Long Grove, however, don’t have access to any of this Lake Michigan water.
Parker said most residents in unincorporated and rural areas rely on well water for drinking and on neighboring fire departments for help. But, he said, that’s the price people pay for a peaceful, rural lifestyle.
According to the Insurance Service Organization (ISO), a private group that estimates the risk of fire for insurance companies, some residents of Hawthorn Woods pay more for insurance than residents of some neighboring communities because of the lack of fire hydrants.
The ISO, which measures a community’s ability to fight a structural fire, looks at the availability of fire hydrants and water supply, the number of fire engines and the staffing and training of firefighters. Fire districts are ranked on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being the highest.
According to the ISO office in Chicago, the Countryside Fire District, which includes Hawthorn Woods, scored a 3 for areas with fire hydrants; a 4 for areas without hydrants but within 5 miles of a fire department, such as where the Swansons lived; and a 9 for areas 10 miles from a fire station.
