Chris Rickert
The Wisconsin State Journal
(TNS)
Nov. 21—The insurer for the owner of a building that was gutted by fire last year is suing the city of Madison for more than $2 million, claiming nonfunctioning or poorly functioning fire hydrants were to blame for the city’s inability to put the fire out more quickly.
The fire, reported just after 4 a.m. on Nov. 14, 2023, largely destroyed the single-story office building at 1310 Mendota St. on the city’s Far East Side. It resulted in no injuries and its cause was never determined, according to the Fire Department.
Allegations in the lawsuit by Society Insurance Co., of Fond du Lac, are similar to what the Madison Fire Department said about the fire in incident reports that day.
“Water supply was a challenge for firefighters during the initial stages of the fire,” the department reported, “with some hydrants providing inadequate water pressure.” The city’s Water Utility was then “contacted immediately” and it “provided support by supplying higher pressure to area hydrants.”
Society says in its suit, filed Nov. 6, that “while responding to the fire call, the Madison Fire Department discovered several city-owned fire hydrants were under-pressurized or not pressurized at all.”
Because of that, the suit says, “there was a significant delay in firefighting efforts exacerbating the severity of the fire damage.”
The suit does not allege exactly how long that delay was, and Society’s Chicago-based attorney, Robert Ostojic, did not respond to requests for comment. Spokespeople for the Fire Department and Water Utility declined to comment on any delay, citing the pending litigation.
It ultimately took about four hours to put the fire out, the Fire Department reported at the time.
Water Utility spokesperson Marcus Pearson said on the day of the fire that the low hydrant pressure was linked to the removal from the city’s water system of a well less than a half-mile away on East Washington Avenue. It was shut down in 2019 because the water it was pumping was polluted with PFAS.
Pearson said then that water pressure to hydrants in that area, which are connected directly to water mains, can be shifted to the area when needed, and that the switch can be done quickly and remotely from a control station and doesn’t require any workers to go to the site. The entire process from 911 call to flipping the necessary switches to shift pressure takes only minutes, Pearson said at the time.
The well, Well No. 15, is currently being upgraded with equipment to remove PFAS and volatile organic compounds and is expected to come back online this summer.
The Water Utility inspects hydrants on a rotating basis, Pearson said Tuesday, but with more than 9,000 hydrants throughout the city, workers “cannot get to each one every year.” So far this year, 3,025 have been inspected and 51 replaced, he said.
He called the low pressure at the hydrants used to fight the Mendota Street fire “a one-off occurrence that involved multiple different factors.”
Society Insurance paid out more than $2 million to building owner Moren Investments to cover losses from the fire and is looking to recoup that money from the city, according to the lawsuit, which also says repairs to the building cost $2.3 million.
Society filed a claim for $2.3 million with the city in January and it was rejected by the City Council in April at the city risk manager’s recommendation.
City risk manager Eric Veum declined to provide details about why he recommended the claim be denied, saying only that “from the information gathered, the city was not negligent.”
___
(c)2024 The Wisconsin State Journal (Madison, Wis.)
Visit The Wisconsin State Journal (Madison, Wis.) at www.wisconsinstatejournal.com
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
