City
What Lies Beneath
I love taking things apart. Seeing how they work. It's like pulling the articulated arms and legs off your action figures and learning about compression coils and ball-joints.
Having less (though not no) action figures now, I have to find other outlets for this simple pleasure.
Like walking past construction sites and having "a-ha!" moments when I catch a glimpse of the white noise infrastructure of my city, disassembled. Infrastructure like fire hydrants.
I don't know how I thought fire hydrants worked. I probably never thought much about how they worked at all. But I imagine that my Sesame Street explanation was that the hydrant was just a "cap" on "water". The water just... got there.
Now my model has shifted, and whenever I see a fire hydrant I'm going to see something bigger. The hydrant as just the dangly fishing lure on that much bigger deep sea fish. Cool.
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super cool, catherine - great photo/post! I love city-innards :)
You should watch How It's Made on the Discovery Channel. I recently saw a segment about how fire hydrants are made.
Fire hydrants are connected to the water line located below the frost line (typically 6ft? under ground); that's why theres a long pipe below the hydrant; when not in use, the water self-drains, preventing water from freezing in the winter.
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1498/why-doesnt-the-water-in-fire-hydrants-freeze-during-winter
Wow, I never imagined there was so much going on beneath them. Some how I just picture a big vat of water...not really. Great pictures Catherine.