This winter is bringing extreme cold, record-breaking snow, and breaking water mains.
These ruptures can cause holes in the street and loss of water pressure for those living nearby.
Ben Bennett, operations manager for field services at Montgomery County Environmental Services, talked with WYSO about what causes these ruptures and how they are fixed.
This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Ben Bennett: With the change in weather and the cold, the ground shifts and it creates havoc on our water mains in the ground. So the ground freezes and falls and just moves a lot underground. People don't realize that.
And sometimes they'll even hear the ground cracking at night and that's the ground moving and our water main are usually buried about four to five feet in the ground, which is normally below the freeze line. But when you get these extreme cold temperatures, you'll get movement even down there and it causes the mains to break.
"It's kind of like a pretzel rod. If you grab a hold of a pretzel rod and you put pressure in the middle of it, because the ground around is moving, it would just kind of snap in half."
Mike Frazier: And what are those pipes made of?
Bennett: Most of our system is cast iron, but the new stuff going into the ground is ductile iron. And the cast isn't as strong as the new ductile iron, but we have miles and miles and miles of the old cast still in our system.
Frazier: Now cast iron obviously doesn't sound like it flexes much, so when the ground around it shifts, it just breaks?
Bennett: Yes, sir. It's kind of like a pretzel rod. If you grab a hold of a pretzel rod and you put pressure in the middle of it, because the ground around is moving, it would just kind of snap in half.
Frazier: And you have crews, I assume, on call 24-7. So whenever a break happens, whatever the temperature is, they have to go out there and take care of it.
Bennett: We do.
Frazier: So when a break actually happens, your crews come out there. What exactly do they do?
Bennett: So first they assess what kind of damage is happening with the road and where the water is going. And then the first thing they start to do is to look for a way to isolate the break. So we have valves that are out in the street most of the time, but some of them are off in the grassy areas or some of our mains even run behind homes and what we consider an easement. But they will start to look for the valves to try and isolate it, to what we call throttling the main down - reducing the amount of water going through the pipes so that we don't lose as much water and it doesn't cause as much damage and it also makes it much easier for us to make the repairs.
Frazier: So you try to isolate as much as you can, and then once you dig in, once you find the break location, then what, you dig into the road and what happens next?
Bennett: I'd say 95% of the time, we're able to make the repair with just throttling the main down and install what we call a repair band, which is a solid steel band with rubber on the inside of it that we just wrap around the pipe and tighten it down and 95% of the time that completes the repair.
Frazier: Is that a permanent repair or just temporary until further efforts are made to fix it?
Bennett: Kind of depends on the situation. Sometimes we can let those go because we know that we're going to be replacing that main in the future. But then sometimes we also have to make plans to come back to make a more permanent repair.
Frazier: So most of the time you're not actually cutting out a section of broken pipe and then sticking in a new pipe. You're just kind of wrapping like a rubber bandage around it. Is that correct?
Bennett: Think of it as a Band-Aid on steroids.
Frazier: I assume the older the plumbing, the more susceptible it is for breakage?
Bennett: That would be correct. We have some put in before the 1950s even in our system. And most of it's still pretty good and strong, but when we have deep freezes like this with the ground movement, it's havoc on our infrastructure.
Frazier: Now when the temperatures warm up, hopefully pretty soon, but certainly around March or April, will that cause other potential issues, ground shifting because of the temperature change and maybe some more ruptures?
Bennett: That would be correct. A lot of people think just when it's cold, but when it starts to warm back up, that ground is moving again, and we'll have a spurt of main breaks, same as we do when it is really cold.
Frazier: If people live near a water main break, should they expect discolored water or lower water pressure, or does it depend on the severity of the break?
Bennett: It depends on the severity of the break. We try to keep people in full pressure as long as we can because sometimes we have some that just aren't as severe as others, and times like this where we're trying to take care of the more severe and busier roads. And then they can still have discolored water. It's usually really brief. If they do have that, we usually tell people to run the cold water in their tub. And it'll usually clears up within five or ten minutes.
Frazier: Is it dangerous to drink in terms of bacteria or is it just sediments?
Bennett: It's not dangerous to drink, it is just sediments.
Frazier: I don't suppose there's anything that anybody can do to make your lives easier.
Bennett: Patience. Patience is huge for us. If you see the crews out working, they will close the roads. We ask people to give them room. There's a lot of dangerous things that the guys are doing and they don't want to have to worry about looking over their shoulder for traffic coming through our road closures.
