HAMBURG, NY - The brutal winter is partially to blame for a number of water main breaks all across Western New York.
The cold combined with aging infrastructure is a bad mix. A viewer concerned about just how long she was going to be without water after a main broke on her street sent a message to our 2-On-Your-Side Tipline for help.
Imagine in this frigid weather working around or actually standing in cold water in a ditch dug more than four deep to reach a water main. It's a routine day for the Erie County Water Authority's repair crews.
On Monday they were working on a recent break at an apartment complex off South Park in Hamburg. It joined the leak list this past weekend, which includes Amherst, West Seneca, Cheektowaga and other communities.
EC Water Authority Executive Engineer Wesley Dust says "14 leaks came in. We got 12 of them fixed right away. We use our own crews, we use outside contractors. We bring in the necessary resources to get the work done but there's only so many people and so much equipment to go around, so you gotta prioritize the worst leaks first the most people outta water".
With 3,000 miles of pipe to maintain, the water authority handles about 1,200 serious leaks in an average year. About a third of them happen in January and February when the frost, sometimes two feet down, causes the ground to shift. And then there's the aging cast iron pipes dating back to the late 1960's or older, which are still in a large percentage of the system.
Leaks can also be tricky to track down. In the South Park case, the water came up about 25 to 30 feet from the spot of the actual leak, and it was only detected with sophisticated sounding gear kind of like sonar.
Of course doing all this work, including the extra snow removal, does takes time . Sometimes it's a matter of clamping the broken pipe to restore service and then returning in warmer weather for a permanent fix. But the conditions obviously take their toll on the workers and their equipment, and slows the pace of repair work.
"We try to fix all our repairs year-round in about four hours. But in winter conditions like this it takes a little bit longer cause lots of times you have to move snow to find valves to shut off water mains. It just takes a lot longer in the winter," Dust said.
That viewer in Amherst who contacted us was without water Sunday night but had it back Monday morning. Surprisingly the number of water main breaks is actually off pace. From the start of the year there's been 231 leaks so far in 2015. That's about 88 less than this time last year. But there could be more with the return this week of more single digit temperatures.
