Adopt-a-Hydrant: Community Hydrant Adoption & Driving Directions

Adopt-a-Hydrant lets residents pick a hydrant near their home or business and commit to keeping it clear of snow, ice, and brush. They sign up on your department's public portal, confirm by email, and show up on a roster inside Command Established so you always know who is looking after what. Nobody needs an account — the adopter is a member of the public, identified only by a verified email address, the same way a permit applicant is.

This article covers turning the program on, what residents see, managing the roster, and (separately) how to get driving directions to any hydrant from the app.

Before You Start

• Module: the Hydrants module must be enabled for your department. The program lives on the Hydrants page, so if you don't see Hydrants in the sidebar, an admin needs to turn the module on first.
• Public portal address: adopters reach the program through your public portal, so your department needs a portal address (slug) before the program can be turned on. If you haven't set one, the Adoption tab shows a Choose a portal address link that takes you to Settings > Public Portal.
• Role: turning the program on, editing the commitment text, and ending an adoption are admin-only (admins and owners). Viewing the roster and program numbers requires the Read permission on Fire Hydrants — the same permission that lets a member see the hydrants list.
• Which hydrants are listed: only hydrants that are publicly owned, in service, and not archived are offered for adoption. Private hydrants and out-of-service hydrants don't appear on the public page (the public list is cached, so a change can take up to ten minutes to show).

Turning On the Program

1. Go to Hydrants in the sidebar
2. Click the Adoption tab (next to Hydrants at the top of the page)
3. In the Adopt-a-Hydrant program card, check Let the public adopt hydrants

Under the checkbox you'll see how many hydrants would be listed (e.g. "142 publicly-owned, in-service hydrants would be listed"). That is the number of eligible hydrants, calculated with the same rules the public page uses. The public list caps what it renders (the 100 nearest once a resident shares their location, or the first 100 otherwise), so very large departments will not see every eligible hydrant on one screen.

Once the program is on, the card shows a Share this link line with your public sign-up URL, a Copy link button, and a Show QR code button. The QR dialog can be printed (with a "Adopt a Fire Hydrant — Scan to adopt a hydrant in your neighborhood" header) or downloaded as a PNG, which works well for flyers, town newsletters, and the station bulletin board.

Residents don't find the adoption page by browsing — there is no link to it from the rest of the portal. Share the link or QR code directly.

Setting the Commitment Text

The What adopters agree to box on the same card holds the wording shown to every resident on the sign-up form. Leave it blank to use the standard wording, which asks adopters to:

• keep about three feet clear on all sides, with a clear path to the street
• check on the hydrant after major storms, when safe
• report damage, leaks, or a missing cap to the department instead of attempting a repair
• avoid salt, open flame, or tools that could damage the hydrant, never overexert themselves, and call 911 in an emergency

It also makes clear the commitment is voluntary and the department remains responsible for maintaining and operating the hydrant.

To use your own wording, type it in the box and click Save wording (or Cancel to discard). Two things to know:

• Each adoption stores a snapshot of the exact wording the resident agreed to, with a timestamp. Editing the text later never changes what past adopters accepted.
• The text is plain text. Line breaks are preserved, so a short bulleted list reads well on a phone.

What Residents See

Your public sign-up page is at:

commandestablished.com/p/your-portal-slug/hydrants

(The Share this link line on the Adoption tab shows the exact URL for your department.)

Finding a hydrant

The page lists available hydrants by number, with hydrants that are already adopted left off the list and a note of how many are already looked after. Since nobody knows their hydrant's number, the page offers Show hydrants near me — a one-time location request that sorts the nearest hydrants to the top with a distance on each row. The location is used only for sorting and is not stored. Rows for hydrants with stored coordinates also have a button that opens the location in Google Maps, so a resident can confirm it's the one outside their house; hydrants without coordinates are listed but have no map button.

Residents can also ask to See these on a map. To see the hydrants on a map, a resident enters their email, clicks Email me the map, and we send them a link that stays good for one week. If a resident doesn't get the map email, have them check spam and wait a bit before requesting again — repeat requests in a short span may not send a new email. The map shows available hydrants as blue pins and adopted ones as grey; tapping a blue pin opens the same sign-up form. This is an optional upgrade, not a wall — anyone can adopt from the list without it.

Signing up

Clicking Adopt this one opens a short form: Your name, Your email, the commitment text under What you're agreeing to, and a checkbox ("I agree to look after Hydrant 123 for Your Department, and I understand this is a voluntary commitment"). Clicking Adopt this hydrant submits it.

Email confirmation

Submitting doesn't adopt the hydrant yet. The resident gets an email from Command Established with the subject "Confirm your hydrant adoption — Your Department" and a Confirm my adoption button. Until they click it:

• the hydrant stays available for someone else to adopt — an unconfirmed submission never holds a hydrant, so nobody can tie one up anonymously
• the adoption shows as Pending verification on your roster and counts toward the Awaiting confirmation number

When they click the link, the adoption becomes Active, the hydrant comes off the public list, and the resident lands on a confirmation page with a View my hydrant button. That "my hydrant" page (at /p/hydrant-status/..., reached only through their emailed link) shows the hydrant number, the date they adopted it, care reminders, the exact wording they agreed to, and a Give up this hydrant button. The confirmation email is their only way back to that page, so it tells them to keep it.

If the link is clicked after the hydrant has become ineligible (archived, taken out of service, or switched to private ownership), or after the adoption has ended, the resident sees "This link is no longer valid" instead.

Managing the Roster

The Adoption tab shows three numbers and the roster:

The Adopters table lists adoptions with the hydrant number, the adopter's name and email, a status badge (Active, Pending verification, Released, or Revoked), and the date it started. Ended adoptions stay in the table as history. The table shows your most recent adoptions; very long histories may not display the oldest rows.

Each hydrant's detail page also has an Adoption card showing who currently looks after it — or, if someone has submitted but not yet confirmed, that applicant with a Pending verification badge — or "Nobody has adopted this hydrant yet" and a count of its other adoption records. That count includes every non-current record for the hydrant — released and revoked adopters, but also unconfirmed submissions that never held it — so it is not strictly a count of past adopters. The card only appears while the program is on.

Ending an adoption

Admins see an End button on any active or pending row. Clicking it asks you to confirm ("Hydrant 123 goes back on the public map for someone else to adopt. The adopter is not notified."); click End adoption to proceed or Keep it to back out. The adoption's status becomes Revoked, the hydrant is immediately available on the public page again, and the adopter's emailed link stops working. Command Established does not email the adopter — if they should know, reach out yourself.

When an adopter releases a hydrant

Adopters can give up a hydrant themselves from their "my hydrant" page using Give up this hydrant, then confirming with Give it up. The adoption's status becomes Released, the hydrant goes back on the public page, and the roster row stays as history. There's no notification to the department, so glance at the roster or the Currently adopted number now and then if you want to spot hydrants that have come free.

Driving Directions to a Hydrant

Separate from the adoption program, any member with access to hydrants can get one-tap driving directions:

• From a hydrant's detail page: the Location card has a Directions button in its header.
• From the offline hydrant list: when you're offline, the Hydrants page shows hydrants saved on your device, and each row has a compass icon (Directions in Google Maps on hover).

Either one opens Google Maps with the hydrant as the destination and no starting point, so Maps uses your device's current location. The link is built from the hydrant's stored coordinates, so it works even when the app itself has no connection (Google Maps still needs its own connection, or a cached map).

If the button is greyed out with No coordinates available for this hydrant, the hydrant record has no usable latitude/longitude — common for records imported from an older system with only a street description. Edit the hydrant and set its location on the map to fix it.

Frequently Asked Questions