Portland, Tennessee Blog

I was very upset to see inmates around town painting fire hydrants, when they entered near place of business the citizens became concerned. Inmates have a place which is not out in the public being "unsupervised" by a man in a van smoking cigarettes.

My six year old and I were driving by when the guys in stripes were painting the fire hydrants on the way to the grocery store. She loves art of any kind. Well on the way back through she was very silent until she noticed the fire hydrants were two toned. She was livid! She said that they had ruined them and should have known they should have been all red. Then she got quiet again and said at least they stayed in the lines. I'll tell her the reason they are two toned and maybe she'll be more understanding.

Firefighter - Thank you for that explanation, good to know and not so good to know there are so many marginal and below hydrants in the area :(

dontmakemelaugh,
The top of the hydrants are color coded for fire department use. There are 4 colors used that indicate about how many gallons per minute(gpm) will flow out of the hydrant. They are:
Blue - 1500gpm or more very good water flow
Green - 1000-1499gpm Good for residential areas
ORANGE 500-999 GPM Marginally adequate
RED Below 500 GPM Inadequate

So next time you see a hyrdrant with one of those colors on it, you will know about how much water will flow when there is a fire. There are a lot of orange and red in Portland. ?????????

Wonder why some of the Hydrants have different colored tops???

Thanks Judy..... I will remember I can do that...

Lee - When it's a topic you started feel free to copy comments and place them where they need to be and then delete them from the thread when someone gets off topic. You, the author of the post and the administrator are the only ones that can do that, I have done it before on my postings to try to keep a thread on topic. Good Luck!

You gotta be kidding! The Chamber of Commerce tried to do a clean-up Portland event in May and only four people showed up. YEAH! FOUR!!!! How embarassing for Portland that nobody cared enough.

We agree that the hydrants look nice. I would like to say that we could perform many other tasks that would make Portland look better rather than painting fire hydrants though. How about a litter free town? This would be a step towards area beautification and also be a demeaning task that reminds them of what and why they are doing it.
Maybe Portland should sponsor a town "beautification" twice a year where the actual residents are a part of the cleaning up of our neighborhoods rather than prisoners who don’t or never have even lived here. Pride stands tall in some places!

Yes, they look awesome! The inmates are doing great work! See, some people were against them, but I think they are sprucing up our town like it needs to be!

They do look nice. Love the bright paints.

It was the county prisoners.