New Water Mains, Burst Water Mains

Another photo essay today. Seems like after all the working on new water mains the past few months, we have a burst pipe of some sort up the street.

It must have burst sometime Tuesday night, because when the water overflowed our driveway (more on that later), it froze and left ice on the driveway. Why did it go over the driveway instead of through the pipe underneath it? Well, last Friday they poured concrete where our driveway meets the road — with the intention of topping that off with asphalt after the concrete cured — and reshaped the dirt in our drainage ditch. But when they reshaped the dirt, they blocked and entirely hid the upper end of the drainage pipe. So the water went over the driveway, since the pipe was blocked.

But it wasn’t blocked completely.  The water eventually eroded through the dirt, found the pipe, and stopped flowing over the driveway.  By the time I got up in the morning and headed to work on Wednesday, there was ice on the driveway, but no water flowing over it.

I walked up the street to the middle of our lot, and saw the water bubbling up out of the ground there, or so I thought. so I thought the leak was there. I then hurried off to catch my bus, texting Betsy to call the  city 311 line to report the leak.

When she walked the dog she came to the same conclusion about the leak as I did — until she went further on up the street.  The leak started nearer to the top of the hill, carved a path under the leaves in the ditch, and the broke out back to the surface in the middle of our lot.

Betsy saw the water main crews come by and look at the leak, but no one did anything to stopy the leak. So our ditch  that they graded so nicely is now being nicely eroded by the running water. It is obviously faster in the evening than it was in the morning.

How much water and how much erosion are we going to have before they stop the leak?  And is the water coming from the new or the old water main? The neighbor down the street says it has to be from  the new main since they switched everyone over.  But we aren’t so sure whether the switch has been made yet.  We haven’t been aware of the water being turned off to switch things over.