Giving directions to Laurie Miller’s home just got easier, courtesy of the city of Miami Beach.
“Make a right on 29th Street, go for one block, and I’m the house with a fire hydrant in the middle of the lawn,” she told a reporter.
On Feb. 23, Miller, 70, received a present from the city: a bright yellow fire hydrant smack dab in her well-manicured lawn between pruned, flowering bushes and palm trees.
She said she came outside about 8 p.m. and found a crew installing new water pipes and improving storm drainage in her Central Bayshore neighborhood had also plopped a hydrant about 14 feet into her roughly 40-by-60-foot yard.
The crew was working in the dark — running late, they said — but that wasn’t the problem.
When she asked what possessed the city to place the hydrant there, Miller, who lives in her home of 42 years with her husband, says she was told that it was what the city’s plans called for — even if planners now agree common sense called for it to go somewhere else.
Engineering documents provided by the city’s Capital Improvement Projects office show that Miller’s yard is only about half her property because the public right-of-way stretches deep into her lawn. As a result, the hydrant is technically on public land.
But while dogs in the neighborhood might be excited about Miller’s new lawn ornament, she just wants it removed, or at least moved to the edge of the lot.
“It’s a joke,” she said.
Miller may laugh about it soon.
City spokeswoman Maria Palacios said Miller won’t have to throw a Marlins cap and T-shirt on her hydrant to pass it off as a grandson. Due to Miller’s repeated complaints, the city plans to move the hydrant as close to the road as possible on Friday.
“I’ll believe it when I see it,” Miller said Thursday.
As for why the hydrant wasn’t placed further out in the first place, Palacios said: “That’s something we will pose to our contractors.”
via miamiherald.com