Sheared hydrant floods clothing boutique in Fairfax District
A sheared fire hydrant in the Fairfax District caused a nightmare for a business owner when her clothing store was flooded.
"It turned zero to 100 in, like, five minutes," Heather Sander said of the amount of water spewing out of the sheared hydrant outside her store.
Sanders' social media posts about the incident have gone viral after the water damaged her woman's boutique called Sorrella. She said a cement truck sheared the hydrant, located at the corner of Melrose and North Orange Grove Monday afternoon.
"It was so loud. I felt like I was in a rainforest," she told CBSLA.
The water pooled on her roof.
"The water caused this to come down and we were actually in here when it happened," she said.
There's been a number of hydrants taken out in the last several weeks. Last month, there was one in sheared in Los Feliz. In May, there was one in Harvard Heights, and in March, in Boyle Heights, the water from a sheared hydrant wasn't turned off for about an hour and a half.
Sanders said her store was looted in 2020 during the civil unrest, in which a police car was burned a few blocks away. She's been working hard to bounce back from that, the pandemic shutdowns and the recent spike in crime.
You can feel Sanders' heartache in this recording, as she got her first look of the damage after the water was turned off. She said one of her neighbors saw the truck taking out the hydrant and took down its information.
"I think it's not good taste to hit and he stopped and he knows that he hit something, and he just doesn't really know that he ruined my whole world," Sanders said.
The Los Angeles City Attorney's Office said that Sanders can file a claim for her damages.
