After a fire gutted a riverside home in Harmar’s Werner Camp neighborhood last summer, one neighbor called the lack of fire hydrants on the property Werner Camp’s “Achilles’ heel.”

It meant that fire crews had to shut down Freeport Road and a set of railroad tracks to drag hundreds of feet of hose from hydrants at the shopping center across the street.

But by the end of the summer, officials say, the problem should be solved.

That’s because the property owners plan to install two new hydrants in the neighborhood, according to Steven Cherin, an attorney representing the owners.

Werner Camp is not a traditional neighborhood of single-family homes. Though most residents own their houses, they lease their land from a rental company.

Since 2020, that company has been Evergreen Werner Hancock LLC, part of the larger Evergreen Parke Communities company that owns similar housing developments throughout Illinois, Michigan and Ohio.

Harmar Police Chief Jason Domaratz, who also sits on the board of Harmar Water Authority, said he hopes the hydrants will be installed by July. He said he recieved no pushback from the company as hydrant discussions progressed after last summer’s blaze.

“Everybody obviously wants to see this happen,” Domaratz said.

While the water authority would install the new hydrants, Domaratz said the property owners would incur the installation and future maintenance costs.

The company is expecting to pay about $15,000 in installation costs, according to Cherin.

With quicker access to water, the hydrants should leave the neighborhood much safer, Allegheny Valley Volunteer Fire Company Chief Jay Zangrille said.

One hydrant, he said, will likely be located by the entrance to the neighborhood near Sunbelt Rentals, while the other would sit at an unspecified midpoint of the property.

“It’ll save a lot of time,” Zangrille said.

No one was injured in last summer’s fire, but it caused extensive property damage.

Soon after the fire, William Flinn told TribLive he’d been living in the neighborhood for more than 50 years. In that time, he said, there had been three or so major fires, any one of which could have been helped by the presence of fire hydrants.

The neighboring Denny Estates plan has multiple hydrants, and even the more isolated community on Twelve-Mile Island, offshore in the river, already has several hydrants, Zangrille previously told TribLive.

Teah Gandi, a partner at Evergreen Parke, had previously told TribLive that the former owner had considered them unnecessary.

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