Early this month there was an emergency with Montevideo’s water system that most people probably never even noticed. At 6:50 on the morning of Aug. 6, an alarm sounded in the water plant.
Fortunately, Montevideo utility operators happened to be in the plant for routine activity when the alarm sounded, and they were immediately able to tell that they were hearing the “low level alarm” that sounds whenever the 500,000 gallon water tower drops from 34 feet of water to 30 feet of water.
While the alarm is programmed to call the homes of city employees when it goes off, the employees’ presence expedited the recovery process.
Employees were quickly able to identify that the problem was a leak in a junction box located in Wildwood Park. The leak was caused by a joint failure in the iron pipes underground because the iron couplers had been corroded by hot ground.
It took a total of 1 hour and 15 minutes to resolve the issue, a process in which the city decided to simply replace just about everything to make sure that this problem does not occur again.
During this time, the 34 feet of water in the watertower dropped to 14 feet, with 300,000 gallons of water pouring out underground.
While most people would never have noticed the problem, the city did have to take some action by asking various users, such as Jennie-O, to reduce water use for the day while the city pumped water back into the water tower. For the most part, this is a process that is fairly simple.
The city typically goes through far more water in a day than was lost. On an average day around 800,000 gallons are used, but on a hot summer day the total can go up to 1 million to 1.2 million gallons. This is because of the water Montevideo maintains underground outside of the water tower.
While the problem was resolved expeditiously, it could have been a lot worse if the leak had not been discovered and fixed so quickly.
Should the water tower ever run completely dry, the problem of refilling it becomes a whole different matter. While the city maintains four active water wells, the point of having the water tower is so that there is somewhere to store the water to maintain pressure in order to get water to anywhere in the city, including elevated apartments. If the water all leaks out, that pressure is lost.
The city would not be able to simply pump water back into the tower anymore from the reserves. Instead, the city would have to pump air through the tower in order to establish the pressure needed to get the water even back up into the tower.
“It is like rebooting a computer,” says City Manager Steve Jones. “We have to completely reset the entire system.”
