If your home catches fire, will your fire hydrant work? FOX4 investigates
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Inside, a destroyed home is black and stark, made of tarps and the remains of furniture. Just one look tells you everything: A disaster.
But it wasn’t always like that. For two years, student and aspiring artist Stephanie Thomas and her boyfriend Chris called it home.
Then came April 11, 2025. It was around 10 p.m., and Stephanie was on the front porch.
“I was hanging out some of my artwork to dry,” she said.
Meanwhile, inside the home, Chris and several friends had just finished a meal.
“Me and my friends, we were all in the kitchen having a good time,” he said.
“The next thing I know, there’s smoke pouring out of the vent.”
Before the couple knew it, their home was being engulfed by a fast-growing fire.
“I don’t understand how there was so much smoke so fast,” Stephanie said.
“I tried to run back in to grab a fire extinguisher, but I couldn’t even make it into the kitchen.”
Then the Kansas City Fire Department showed up and got to work. The couple felt hopeful. However, that hope was quickly extinguished.
“The next thing I know, they say they’re out of water,” Chris said.
“I look up and they’re like, ‘We’re out of water,’ and I’m like, ‘What?'”
Firefighters often bring water with them in trucks referred to as “water trucks,” but that only lasts so long. That’s why your local fire hydrant is often the best solution. That is, if they work.
For context, the closest fire hydrant to Stephanie and Chris’ home on N. Lydia Avenue was more than 500 feet away. But the fire crew found it lying on its side, broken.
So they tried another, farther away hydrant. But that didn’t work either. As minutes ticked away, the fire grew.
Finally, the firefighters connected to a working hydrant at 38th and Wayne – more than
a thousand feet away from the burning home. And by then, it was too late to save it.
“We were so close to reaching everything we wanted to do in life,” Chris said.
He said the firefighters, too, were saddened and one even offered an apology.
Chris said the firefighter told him they could have at least saved the couple’s belongings if the fire hydrant had been working.
When FOX4 asked for the fire incident report, we noticed something strange.
There was not a single mention of fire hydrants, much less the fact that they were broken fire hydrants. Instead, it said:
“Pumper 06 entered the building through the basement door, located the fire in the basement of the residence, and successfully extinguished it.”
Worse than that, a month after the fire, FOX4 found out that the first broken hydrant was still broken.
“Why is this not fixed?” Chris asked.
He told FOX4 that he was surprised the problem hadn’t been fixed. However, it’s not the first time something like this has happened in our area.
Last year, a long-broken hydrant hindered firefighters while battling a blaze at 42nd and Jackson.
In 2022, an unrepaired fire hydrant delayed firefighting efforts at a home fire in the Northland.
Also in 2022, a “dry” hydrant slowed fire crews from dousing a fire on 58th Street.
Despite all of this, Battalion Chief Michael Hopkins of the Kansas City Fire Department maintains that hydrant failure is “not something that we encounter on a daily basis.”
He loosely estimates that out of about 26,000 hydrants in the city, approximately 99% of them work.
“I would say for that particular incident, it was obviously an issue,” Hopkins said.
“In the large scale of things and the day-to-day operations and the amount of fires and calls that we run, it’s a smaller problem.”
Hopkins also said the KCFD notified KC Water about the broken fire hydrants from the April fire at Stephanie and Chris’ home, since KC Water is responsible for most fire hydrant repairs.
The Problem Solvers discovered that the water department was notified about the first broken fire hydrant as early as December 2024.
KC Water then logged it as a low priority.
It wasn’t until May 2025, after the fire, after our interviews with Chris and Stephanie, that KC Water finally fixed that hydrant.
FOX4 asked KC Water’s Water Director Kenneth Morgan about the delay.
“The hydrant was scheduled to be replaced,” he said.
“The hydrant right adjacent to that resident was inoperable, but there was an adjacent hydrant in the area or vicinity that was operational and was able to be used to support the fire activity that took place. And so it’s not that there was virtually none.”
Which brings us back to Chris and Stephanie, who are currently living with friends.
“We basically have the clothes on our back,” she said.
But she is more concerned about the larger situation and the possible risk to other Kansas City homeowners.
“Do what you’re supposed to do before somebody else gets hurt,” Stephanie said, urging the city to take action.
“We were lucky enough all of us made it out of here alive, but that might not happen to the next people.”
Previous Missouri law required annual testing of every fire hydrant in the community water system.
In August of 2024, the state hydrant inspection statute was changed to the looser requirement of having “scheduled testing of every hydrant in the community water system.”
Both KCFD and KC Water assured that “99%” of hydrants in our area work.
In March though, FOX4 requested five years of city fire hydrant inspections.
What followed from the city government was delay after delay, claims of confusion on their part, claims that there were no records of the inspections, and even having some of our records requests denied for no logical reason.
Finally, on Tuesday – more than two months after we first made our request – the city emailed us some hydrant data, but not enough to do our analysis.
However, FOX4 will continue to investigate and dig until we have an answer for you.
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