Thousands of often undervalued and overlooked fire hydrants dot the landscape of the Mahoning Valley, the state and the nation. Too often, however, these critical tools for ensuring public safety are not given the proper respect and care they deserve. Some, alarmingly enough, cannot even perform their potentially life-saving function.

Such scenarios are unacceptable.

That scenario, however, is fact, not fiction. It plays out in communities large and small throughout the nation. Consider this response to a fire call at a home on Tibbetts Wick Road in Liberty on Dec. 13.

A fire department report cited “heavy fire” as crews realized the fire hydrant they were trying to use was “inoperable.” In the meantime, the fire spread and the home’s second-floor roof collapsed.

While firefighters tried to lay a supply line, the report stated yet another hydrant was found inoperable. Crews finally were able to find a viable water source and run about 1,500 feet of hose to reach and douse the blaze.

Fortunately, the residents — William Howard, his wife, their four children and a few pets — safely escaped the fire that destroyed their home thanks to properly functioning smoke detectors.

The Howards’ horror story, however, is not an isolated case. Reports from across the state and nation underscore the pervasiveness of the public-safety dilemma posed by low-pressured and inoperable hydrants.

In Detroit, for example, its city council last year allocated $7 million in emergency funding to repair more than 1,000 fire hydrants that were out of commission. Reports from other cities as large as Newark, N.J., to as small as Martins Ferry, Ohio, illustrate concerted efforts to repair hydrants or better alert residents and firefighters of low-functioning or inoperable water sources to fight fiery infernos.

In many cases, the problem of old and neglected hydrants ties directly to the larger problem of our region’s and our nation’s aging water infrastructure. For example, the Environmental Protection Agency has been hounding the city of Youngstown for years to speed up efforts to address an estimated $160 million wastewater improvement project.

The high cost of water projects represents one understandable but nonetheless insufficient reason for inaction. As for fire hydrants, the cost to replace and install a new device can run about $7,000. Multiply that by the hundreds and thousands of hydrants in any given community, and the total bill becomes astronomical for today’s cash-strapped local governments.

Nonetheless ensuring fire hydrants work efficiently is a basic safety function of local government. To their credit, Girard Mayor Mark Zuppo and city Safety-Service Director Sal Ponzio have been working with their fire and water departments to implement a preventive maintenance program for fire hydrants throughout the city and Liberty.

“We’ve added that to be one of our top priorities — to find money to buy bulk orders of fire hydrants,” Zuppo told this newspaper’s reporter Chris McBride recently. Toward that end, Girard City Council earlier this month hired a consulting firm to help the city secure grant funding to implement a comprehensive fire hydrant maintenance program.

Other communities throughout Mahoning, Trumbull and Columbiana counties should follow Girard’s proactive and responsible lead.

As a general gauge, the average life span of a fire hydrant is 50 years, and we suspect many in our region have long outlived their effective usefulness.

Given the high costs of fire hydrant maintenance and replacement, the National Fire Protection Association offers some lower-cost alternatives for communities to consider. It calls for color coding the domes of hydrants to alert firefighters of their effectiveness.

The colors provide immediate warnings to firefighters on the available flow of water from the hydrants in gallons per minute. The color code for different flow rates are: light blue for optimal 1,500 GPM and above, green for 1,000 to 1,499 GPM, orange for 500 to 999 GPM and red for faulty weak flows of fewer than 500 GPM.

Such alerts can prove invaluable when minutes and even seconds count in saving lives and minimizing property damage.

Toward those goals, we strongly urge fire departments and local governments throughout the Valley to follow Girard’s responsible short-term and long-term plans to guarantee proper well-functioning hydrants in their communities.

Communities cannot afford to delay action until an inoperable fire hydrant leads to catastrophic damage and loss of life. Clearly, doing little or nothing must not be an option