The first water main broke Monday just after 4 p.m. along Heber Avenue. Park City Utilities Director Clint McAffee said crews were able to quickly shut off the water and had staff, equipment, and materials on site within 90 minutes to dig down to the break.
About six hours later, two more water lines broke on Main Street; one in front of Java Cow and another on the 500 block of Main Street. McAffee said these were fire lines.
“We have the main water line in the road,” McAffee said. “And then fire lines, providing fire suppression service, and domestic service to each building come off that main [line], and those laterals are what are breaking.”
Even with a broken fire line, McAffee said the fire department would be able to fight a fire using fire hydrants for a water source.
Right after crews completed the overnight repair of the Heber Avenue water line break and were re-pressurizing the pipe Tuesday morning, two more fire lines broke.
“Really, we attribute this to just aging infrastructure,” he said. “Some of these fire lines are just not aging well. There's a lot of exterior corrosion on the pipe rusting, they're just rusting. So, if you get any kind of pressure fluctuation, that pressure finds the weak point in the pipe and breaks it. Luckily, in all these cases, we think property damage is minimal.”
And if that wasn’t enough to keep them busy, McAffee said when the crew was excavating the water line on Heber Avenue, there was an unmarked natural gas line that they hit.
“When we dig, we're required to call Blue Stakes and all the utilities, they come up and mark it before we can start digging,” he said. “And to my understanding, this was an unmarked gas line. So, they were unaware they hit it, it broke. Dominion responded and, as far as I know, it's resolved.”
The city has several of its own staff repairing the leaks as well as private subcontractors who have emergency on-call agreements with the city when something like this happens. He said he expects it will be a few weeks before all of the repairs are made, and the asphalt has been fully restored.
Unfortunately, McAffee said without digging up the streets, there’s no way for the city to know which water line might break next.
“With exterior corrosion, unless you expose the pipe, you can't really determine the condition,” he said. “Obviously, when a pipe breaks, we dig it up, and we can see it, we can do an assessment at that point and fix it. But just the frequency of these breaks on the fire lines on Main Street, we're going to start elevating the priority of those and start looking at a plan. I can't tell you what that looks like exactly. We have over 6,000 connections in the city and have over 130 miles of pipe. So, we need to fit it in with all that.”
McAffee expects that both lanes of traffic will remain open on Heber Avenue and Main Street while crews repair the problems. However, drivers can expect short lane closures during repaving.
