Hydrant PressureCollin WangAward: Top 100
School: junipero serra high school This image was taken from my car as I was on my way home from school. A very tall stream of water had erupted from the ground because a fire hydrant had broken, and I wanted to calculate the approximate height of the water using physics. I first looked up the average water pressure and pipe diameter for a fire hydrant, which was around 50 psi and 6 inches. These values were assumed to be those of the fire hydrant as there was no concrete way of knowing the exact numbers. After converting the values into meters and Pascals, I plugged those values into Bernoulli's equation, giving me the initial velocity of the water, which was 26.26 m/s. Finally, I used the equation height = velocity²/2gravity to find the height of the water, which was approximately 35.18 meters. 
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