Local officials wrestle with a growing annoyance: the theft of fire hydrant caps.

Sometime late last year, Eric Tynan, general manager of the Castroville Community Services District, started noticing an unwelcome trend: The caps on the sides of fire hydrants in and around Castroville were starting to get stolen.

Many of them were brass, and cost $249 to replace, but Tynan estimates they bring in only $9 in scrap value. The rash of thefts, he says, has recently cost the district about $5,000.

Caps typically are made from the same metal as the hydrant – brass, or cast iron – but there are missing caps on hydrants everywhere, or in some cases, replacement caps made of plastic, which have no scrap value.

Seaside Fire Chief Mary Gutierrez says she’s heard of cap theft issues in Del Rey Oaks, Sand City and Monterey, but hasn’t seen it in Seaside. (There’s at least one missing cap, and one plastic replacement cap, on Hilby Avenue.)

Law enforcement leaders in Monterey and Seaside say they have not heard about the issue. But Monterey Fire Chief Gaudenz Panholzer says he’s seen it for years, and surmises that people rarely file police reports about it.

The caps are important to replace, Panholzer says, because they not only protect the threads that firefighters screw their hoses into, more importantly they keep the outflow free of debris.

The maintenance of caps is the responsibility of water providers. On the majority of the Monterey Peninsula, that falls on California American Water. Cal Am spokesperson Josh Stratton says he is “painfully aware of the cap stealing,” adding that because the rate of thefts has increased, Cal Am will be replacing stolen caps with plastic ones going forward.