It’s been a bad month for water line breaks.
Residents near Stikine Avenue and also on Cow Alley awoke last Friday to dry taps. They were the latest in five water main breaks across the borough in August.
That’s six if you count that the break at Stikine Avenue that was reported just after midnight had two breaks that had to be fixed several times.
“We actually fixed the Stikine Avenue one three separate times here this morning,” Public Works Director Tom Wetor said last Friday.
Earlier in the week there was a water main break out Zimovia Highway, near where a pipe had broken a couple weeks earlier. Wetor said that could indicate that the line could be a new weak point, or it could just be a coincidence.
The pipe in Cow Alley had also just been patched in early April, about 30 feet away from this most recent break, according to Wetor.
There are two types of pipes carrying water below Wrangell streets. There are concrete pipes, which were very popular from the 1930s to 1970s, and then there are ductile iron pipes, which were installed in the 1980s.
Many of the older roads in Wrangell — like Stikine Avenue — have water mains made of concrete that are past their life expectancy, according to Wetor. This is also true of the line beneath Cow Alley.
Most of the water mains that broke in August were made of concrete.
The other kind of pipe, ductile iron, was installed throughout Wrangell in the 1980s at the peak of the state oil-revenue boom, Wetor said.
“We probably have more ductile iron pipe in the ground for water mains,” said Amber Al-Haddad, Capital Projects Department director and former director of Public Works. “And we have been seeing early corrosion in the ductile iron pipes, which has been one of our biggest problems for many years.”
