Every now and then Vancouver’s fire hydrants are a topic at the Greater Vancouver meetup. I assume this is because most fire hydrants have a reference id printed on them which makes them identifiable and StreetComplete started asking for their type.

We had noticed before that there is an area which includes parts of Downtown where hydrant refs start with a 0 (digit zero) or an O (letter O as in Oscar). The character is hard to identify on the physical tags but does looks different than the 0 (digit zero) in the number part.

To lift the ‘secret’, I looked up the refs in the open data catalogue of Vancouver link. All refs start on a letter. This means, the character is question is the letter O as in Oscar.

Vancouver uses the letters E until W from West to East throughout the city. A until D do not seem to be used but would fit onto the University Endowment Lands where UBC is located.

Posts with pictures:

• https://mastodonten.de/@jaller94/100462372351029434 (all 6504 fire hydrants)

• https://mastodonten.de/@jaller94/100462411318757401 (the three subsystems)

• https://mastodonten.de/@jaller94/100462443475442296 (fire hydrants starting with O)

P.S. While we tag the refs as found on the fire hydrants (e.g. H13006), the city has a different id schema for them: WH-H13-006.