BROOKINGS A water main break in downtown Brookings on Wednesday morning disrupted service to customers, but Brookings Municipal Utilities was striving to have repairs completed by 6 p.m. Wednesday.
Eric Witte, BMUs water/wastewater and engineering manager, said the outage involved a 6-inch cast iron pipe near the intersection of Third Avenue and Fourth Street.
Its going to turn into a little bit bigger repair than some, Witt told the Brookings Register in an interview. The frost is 3, maybe 4 feet under the road, so to get through that with a bucket requires a ripping tooth. Getting through the frost is (the) time-consuming part of the operation.
The timeline is an ideal one, he noted. Thats if things go as planned, he said of completing the work. Theres always an unknown digging through the frost in winter.
Witt said the outage has affected three blocks: on Fourth Street from Main to Third Avenue and Third Avenue from Fifth Street to Front Street. He added that it’s the 10th water main break in the last several months, all of which have been on older, cast iron pipes and related to the cold weather.
Its warmer now, but we had that spate of really cold temperatures, so just because it gets a little warmer underground that frost still keeps moving around. As the frost starts to you know, the surface thaws but sometimes it will keep driving the frost deeper, Witt explained. Its a hard thing to predict what that frost in the ground does as it starts thawing out. Sometimes the warmup after a cold spell is just as bad for the occurrence of water breaks as the cold spell itself.
The previous nine water main breaks also led to some service outages, typically a half day or so in a good scenario, Witt pointed out. There was one, though, he said that required multiple repairs over a span of a couple of days; it occurred on Feb. 20 on Elmwood Drive just west of 22nd Avenue. That project stretched from Thursday into Friday, and created close to a 24-hour water outage.
Weve had a run of them, Witt said of the water main breaks. Our guys have been working, and some of these repairs are in the overnight hours we try to get them repaired as quick as we can and get people back in service.
Contact Mondell Keck at [email protected].
Leave a Reply