Water Main Break Stops — Creates More Questions

Note: this is a continuation of several other posts.  For more on them, see these links: 

Water Main Bursts

Day 4 of Water Main Burst

Day 7 Update

Our water main is no longer running like a gushing fire hydrant down our street and across our driveway. After my last update, the culvert pipe under our driveway became partially unclogged and the water started flowing under the driveway again. Then it started slowly silting back up until by Friday some water was starting to flow over the top again.

Meanwhile on Wednesday Betsy got a call from the city that they would be working Thursday-Saturday to finish up the pipe work so they could switch our water over to the new main and shut the water off at the leak.

On Saturday morning we went out to find the water had stopped flowing. Based on the call Betsy had, that should mean we are on the new water main. But the guy from the city I talked to back during the snow storm (who wasn’t out to investigate my complaints, but complaints of other people about me not keeping my pipe unclogged) told us that someone should be coming door to door to let us know before they switched over, because we would have a temporary water outage.  We haven’t received that visit. So based on one datapoint we should be on new water main. Based on the other data point, we should still be on old water main.

But it still leaves the question of how our ditches and culverts are going to be taken care of. On Saturday I tried to dig out the end of our culvert. The dirt wasn’t dirt — it was a gloppy muck of a mess. It kept wanting to slide back into the hole, until I moved enough that it finally sort of stayed put. But I couldn’t dig it out to the bottom. Even if I had, more water coming would just make the rest of the glop upstream from it slide on down and replug the pipe.

And more water is coming. We have this snow to melt before anything can really be done. It is already starting to create a trickle out there.

The culvert just up the street from us never did get unplugged, so any water that comes will go across their driveway until the contractors finish playing around and they can get their pipe unplugged.

Part of the reason we had so much muck going through our pipe to plug our culvert, is the digging they did right in front of our house to install some new connection pipe. In the picture above you can see a pipe sticking out of the hillside — or what is left of the hillside. The digging and subsequent erosion from the water main torrent collapsed a significant portion of the hillside and sent it downhill to plug our culvert.

As I mentioned in a previous blog, when the contractors dug up the ditch for the new water main, they regraded the earth back over it, and in the process regraded the dirt so it totally covered the end of our culvert pipe. The subsequent water from the main break first unplugged, replugged, unplugged and replugged the culvert. In the above picture you see where I partially dug the pipe out to unplug it again — until the next serious water movement.