10 Days without Water: A Case Study of a Town in Crisis Brad Rayburn, MRWA Circuit Rider MRWA assisted the City of Piedmont with restoring water after they unexpectantly lost water to approximately 1,500 customers on March 13, 2021. Those customers included the school, a nursing home, and numerous businesses. The town of Piedmont has a creek that twists throughout the entire town with numerous creek crossings. The suspect for a leak was one of those crossings. Piedmont has three towers in town that supply water to their customers and two of those towers were completely empty. The towers are filled from their surface water treatment plant that is located at the southern end of town. Unfortunately, it took ten grueling days to completely restore service to everyone because of multiple issues that came up during this event. March 13 – That morning, Piedmont Water Specialist Brandon Radford began receiving calls that continued throughout the day from customers informing him they had no water. Radford and the city water department considered that a water leak had caused the issue and thought they had a good idea where it was located. The maintenance department worked tirelessly throughout the night into the following day to expose the 6” main that was in a creek crossing. They assumed the main was broken, but after further inspection discovered this was not the case. All other probable locations were checked, but they could not find the source of the leak. MRWA Emergency Response Coordinator Eric Fuchs was contacted by SEMA following Piedmont’s request for bottled water, and on Monday morning MRWA Circuit Rider Joe Anstine arrived on-site.
MRWA Circuit Riders Jeff Lee and Joe Anstine exercise valves for leak detection.
March 15-16- Anstine worked all day and into the evening searching for the leak, and later that evening found a leak, which we will call Leak #1. The following morning Leak #1, a leak on a small service line serving a meter, was dug up and repaired and ruled not to be the primary leak. Anstine was joined by MRWA Circuit Riders Jeff Lee and Brad Rayburn to assist with leak location. The Circuit Riders searched most of the day by exercising valves to see if water could be heard going through the valves with acoustic leak detection equipment. By afternoon, the Circuit Riders had located Leak #2 on a 6” water main which appeared large enough to prevent the towers from filling. Leak #2 was repaired that evening but did not resolve the tower situation. March 17- The Circuit Riders were joined by MRWA Source Water Protection Specialist Eric Fuchs and MRWA Circuit Rider Eric Thurman to assist in the search. That day they located 2 additional leaks (#’s 3 & 4): the first isolated by a valve and the other repaired. Unfortunately, neither helped restore water service to those 1,500 customers. Typically, a leak this large does not take this long to locate, but this was far from typical. Piedmont Water Specialist Brandon Radford and crew repair a leak on an 8” main.
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