As the City of Carroll investigates the reasons behind three water main breaks in a single week, City Manager, Mike Pogge-Weaver, says the sequence of breaks falls outside the scope of what would be considered the norm.
He explains that the nearly 5,000 linear feet of pipe is built in 16-foot segments, with all three breaks occurring 100 feet or more between. The first break occurred in the afternoon of Monday, Aug. 14, and took city employees until the early morning hours of the next day to completely remove and replace a segment of the pipe.
The other two breaks, on Thursday, Aug. 17 and Friday, Aug. 18, were much smaller and took only about five hours each to fix with a sleeve fitted over the hole in the pipe. The good news, Pogge-Weaver says, is that those two pipe segments weren’t as corroded as the area of the first break. He adds that even though this main was installed to service the old GE plant, they should not be seeing this type of deterioration yet. This is why the city is conducting an investigation, to determine if there is some sort of unusual soil properties that are accelerating the erosion process and if so, how pervasive it is.
City crews will be conducting test digs to see what the pipe looks like in different segments along its length.
