A small town south of Quebec City is keeping a close eye on its fire hydrants after 41,000 litres of water were stolen in the middle of the night.
Laurent Marcotte, the mayor of the municipality of Saint-Léonard-d’Aston, Que., says the thieves hit the town’s hydrants twice in one week and transferred the water into tanker trucks.
He says he doesn’t understand why this happened.
“I’d really like to know what’s behind this,” said Marcotte. “The goal isn’t really to send someone to jail, it’s to understand why they need the water and why they aren’t calling the municipalities … they call us, and we arrange it together.”
He says he advised provincial police, who say they will monitor the area to prevent similar incidents in the coming days.
But Marcotte says this theft is part of a pattern. For weeks, he says the town has been on alert due to similar reports from neighbouring municipalities, including Saint-Wenceslas and Sainte-Eulalie, Que.
On Thursday morning, he says there was an alert of excessive water consumption in the early hours of both Tuesday and Thursday.
“There had been no fire,” said Marcotte, who sent out a municipal alert, urging residents to report suspicious activity.
He says the town just wants to know why this happened and prevent recurrence, considering that when a fire hydrant is not opened correctly — or all the way — it can damage the soil and eventually lead to the need for repair.
“At some point, if the fire hydrant fails and we don’t notice it right away, but an event like a fire happens, we could get to the hydrant and it wouldn’t work,” he said.
Marcotte adds that while the town has security cameras that captured some footage, they weren’t able to decipher licence plates.
Louis-Philippe Ruel, a provincial police spokesperson, says they don’t have the details to be able to move forward with the file but confirmed that private citizens cannot use fire hydrants.
For now, he says it’s about doing preventive work.
He says the incident in Saint-Léonard-d’Aston was the only one reported and police are unaware of other similar incidents.
