Water is back on for several homes in the Lena Point area after a water main leak caused the city to shut off the utility early Friday morning.
Late Thursday night, workers with the city’s Water Utility Division noticed that the million-gallon Lena Point Reservoir wasn’t recharging as quickly as usual — the first sign of a leak.
“Normally, we get reports of water main problems from people who see water coming out of the ground on the side of the road, but that couldn’t happen this time,” Samantha Stoughtenger, Wastewater Utility superintendent, said.
By Friday morning, Stoughtenger and her staff had located the leak. Corrosion had eaten a hole in a large water main running along Glacier Highway just past the southern intersection with Point Lena Loop Road. Though only a couple inches in diameter, the hole was releasing about 250 gallons of water per minute into the surrounding soil, and “that’s a lot,” according to Stoughtenger.
The water leaking from the pipe was visible from the surface, as it typically is, only not from the street. Stoughtenger had to walk a few feet into the woods off of the road in order to find evidence of the leak.
The city hired Admiralty Construction Inc. to replace the problematic pipe, a job that first required three workers to dig a 10-foot-deep trench in order to access and assess the main.
“You don’t exactly know where the real problem is until you get in there to look at it,” Stoughtenger said while watching the Admiralty workers pump water out of the pit so they could begin cutting out the corroded pipe.
While the workers were replacing the main, the city had to shut off water to seven homes in the Lena Point area, a fact that troubled Stoughtenger. At 1 a.m. Friday, she hung notices on the doors of all affected homes so that their inhabitants would know why they didn’t have water in the morning.
“I wanted to let people know as quickly as I could, and that was the best I could do; I couldn’t call them that late,” she said. “For us, the most imperative need is to get water back to the homeowners.”
All told, Stoughtenger estimates that emergency main repair will cost the city about $30,000 to $40,000 — the cost of aging infrastructure, she said. The corroded main was installed in the late ‘80s, and while some pipes like it can last for 50 years, others last less time than this one.
“This isn’t something that we could’ve maintained better,” Stoughtenger said. “It’s just old.”
She noted the city is working additional corrosion control measures into its future water infrastructure projects.
The city currently maintains more than 175 miles of water mains, most of which have been installed since the mid 1980s. Problems like the one Stoughtenger and the Water Utility Division had to tackle Friday aren’t an everyday part of job, but they aren’t unheard of either. Stoughtenger said that the city has had to deal with half a dozen problems of a similar size during the past year and a half.
• Contact reporter Sam DeGrave at 523-2279 or at sam.degrave@juneauempire.com.
Ed Beam, a laborer with Admiralty Construction Inc., cuts out a corroded section of water main off of Glacier Highway near Point Lena Loop Road.
Shaun Lewis (left) and Ed Beam (right), of Admiralty Construction Inc., work to fix a leaking water main off of Glacier Highway. Corrosion ate a hole in the pipe, which was installed in the late ’80s.
