Audit Report On The Department Of Environmental Protection’s Fire Hydrant Repair Efforts
AUDIT REPORT IN BRIEF
This audit determined whether the New York City Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) performs fire hydrant repairs in a timely manner. The primary scope period covered by this audit was Fiscal Year 2009 (July 1, 2008 through June 30, 2009).
DEP’s Bureau of Water and Sewer Operations (BWSO) operates and maintains the City’s water and sewer systems. As part of its responsibilities, BWSO maintains and repairs the City’s 109,217 fire hydrants. The fire hydrant repair process begins when a service request is received by BWSO. BWSO receives service requests related to fire hydrants from two primary sources: the New York City Fire Department (FDNY) and the City’s 311 Customer Service Center. In Fiscal Year 2009, DEP received a total of 44,269 service requests and initiated 21,695 hydrant-repair work orders. DEP reported in the Mayor’s Management Report that high-priority hydrants were repaired in an average of 15.2 days in Fiscal Year 2009, slightly longer than the average of 14.8 days in the previous year.
Audit Findings and Conclusions
The timeliness of DEP’s handling of fire hydrant service requests needs improvement. DEP has not established time standards for resolving such requests, even those considered to be of a high priority, and has presented insufficient evidence to show that it effectively tracks the overall timeliness of repairs. As a result, greater assurance is needed that DEP is ensuring that service requests are generally being resolved in as timely a manner as possible.
In addition, DEP includes only FDNY-designated high-priority repairs in its analysis and reporting of the timeliness of repairs to high-priority broken or inoperative hydrants. DEP does not currently measure its timeliness in completing repairs the agency itself deems to be high priority. As a result, DEP does not have a complete picture of its efficiency in completing high priority repairs. Furthermore, although DEP was able to provide us with data on its fire hydrant repair efforts for Fiscal Year 2009 that were sufficiently reliable for audit testing purposes, some concerns exist about the accuracy and completeness of these data. Finally, DEP needs to institute a supervisory verification of the inspections and repairs performed by work crews to provide greater assurance that work is completed as reported.
Audit Recommendations
To address the issues, the audit recommends, among other things, that DEP:
- Develop written time standards for handling fire hydrant complaints, especially those that are deemed to be high-priority.
- Improve its tracking of pending requests so that it can identify all requests that have been open for an extended period of time, determine why they remain open, and take the necessary actions to resolve them.
- Develop a performance indicator that tracks its timeliness in resolving hydrant service requests that the agency itself designates as high-priority.
- Require its crew supervisors to check a sample of the inspections and repairs completed in response to 311 requests.
Agency Response
In its response, DEP generally agreed with six of the audit’s eight recommendations, disagreed with one, and did not respond to one.