NWA water leaks present challenges

4 cities responsible for maintaining own systems fed by Beaver Water District

Staffing, topography and contractors errantly boring into the ground present challenges to Northwest Arkansas cities as they try to maintain the water lines that supply a crucial resource to homes and businesses.

The region gets its drinking water from Beaver Lake. The water is distributed from the Beaver Water District.

Once the water leaves the Beaver Water facility in Lowell, it’s up to each of the four major cities in the region to maintain their own pipes, said Kevan Inboden, chief operating officer of the district. Smaller cities then feed into the lines from each of the four cities, he said.

It’s atypical for line breaks in one city to impact another, Inboden said. However, a major break earlier this month in Bentonville ended up having a ripple effect in Benton County.

A contractor accidentally bored into the 48-inch concrete main pumping water from the district to Bentonville, prompting city officials to ask residents to conserve water. Crews made an emergency connection to the Rogers Water Utilities distribution system. By Thursday, the main was repaired, and water service resumed as usual.

“In that situation, it somewhat indirectly affected Rogers, but it wasn’t really a noticeable impact on Rogers other than that they were letting water pass through their system and on to Bentonville,” Inboden said.

Line breaks can result in a waste of water but no significant impact to the environment, Inboden said. Beaver Lake maintains a large reservoir, and officials have no indication the water supply will be at risk anytime soon, he said.

“The lake can supply multiples of what our average day is, so it would have to be a really extreme drought situation” to impact the water supply, Inboden said.

However, the district and its four major distribution systems are experiencing tremendous population growth, Inboden said. The growth will require major investment in the systems over the next several years, he said.

MAKING DO

Fayetteville’s hilly terrain presents consistent challenges, said Tim Nyander, the city’s utilities director. Hilly areas require higher pressure to get water to homes, and as a result, the pipes can get strained. The extra pressure can cause breaks in older pipes, he said.

The city has a lot of outdated cast iron and galvanized water pipes, especially in older parts of town. Cast iron pipes corrode when exposed to air and water, and cities have largely phased them out. Galvanized pipes are coated in zinc and also corrode. The city tries to replace old pipes with more modern ductile iron or polyvinyl chloride pipes that have a lifespan of at least 100 years, he said.

Many leaks lie underground without revealing themselves on the surface, so city crews use an acoustic detection device to find them, Nyander said. Crews typically find 10-12 leaks a week that way, in addition to those they already know about. Nyander said crews have about 80 leaks on the work list currently.

Staffing is another challenge. The city has a little more than 20 employees who set out in teams to repair leaks. The staffing limitation has really shown itself in the last decade or so, Nyander said.

“You can work a lot of overtime, but you can only do as much as you can do with the people that you’ve got,” he said.

Installing water line taps to new residences also hinders the city’s efforts to fix leaks, Nyander said. Crews typically split their time between installing new taps and fixing leaks, and with the city’s rapid population growth, balancing responsibilities can be a challenge, he said.

Many water line breaks still remain unpredictable. Water moves in both directions in the pipes, and the pipes themselves tend to move underground, Nyander said. An example of an unpredictable break happened in 2021 at Makeig Court and Warwick Drive in a neighborhood south of Paradise Valley Athletic Club. The City Council ended up raising the dollar amount it can provide to property owners who experience water damage from breaks to up to $100,000, far higher than the $25,000 cap before the break.

The city tries to get proactive when it can. The council earlier this month approved a $3.8 million project to replace an aging water line from Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard to South School Avenue.

The city also is about to start an $85 million project to install a new transmission water line spanning 11 miles on the west side of town from near Elm Springs to Arkansas 112 and Van Asche Drive. Money is coming from a low-interest loan from the state.

Installing the new transmission line will add capacity to the west side of town and relieve strain on the system on the east side of town, Nyander said.

TAKING TIME

Johnny Lunsford, operations manager for Rogers Water Utilities, said he sympathized with Fayetteville’s challenges. Fayetteville has a larger surface area to contend with, but Rogers also has older parts of town that are prone to line breaks, he said.

Water lines in the area around Lake Atalanta, for instance, were not built to the city’s specifications, and the old cast iron pipes beat against rocks in the ground, Lunsford said. That part of town also has acidic soils that tend to eat through the pipes, he said.

The city has been mapping out its most problematic areas using sensors and replacing old pipes when it can, Lunsford said. For instance, the city is in the middle of a project to replace lines along Arkansas 12 near the boat ramp at Lake Atalanta, he said.

Rogers changed its permitting for contractors to dig into the ground about four years ago, and it’s helped to significantly reduce the number of accidental line breaks, Lunsford said. City officials meet with every company that plans to dig into the ground, providing maps and rules to follow while on the job. Companies also have to provide the city a $5,000 deposit before starting work in case they clip a line, he said.

“A mark might be off or something, but that’s not their fault, it’s ours,” Lunsford said. “We were getting four or five a day. We’re down to maybe that in a year.”

Heath Ward, executive director of Springdale Water Utilities, described his city’s system as “world class.” The city has a full-time crew whose sole responsibility is to find and work on leaks, he said.

Having too many leaks in a system decreases the pressure in the pipes, making them vulnerable to more breaks if debris is able to get into them, Ward said.

“Overall, parts of our system are old,” he said. “We’ve got issues like every other utility, and it’s a fight we have to fight every day.”

Crews focus on particular neighborhoods known to have older infrastructure or that have pipes with stronger-than-average pressure, Ward said. It costs less for the city to pay a full-time crew to find leaks than it would to react to leaks after the fact, letting treated water the city paid for go to waste, he said.

Most of the naturally occurring line breaks in Spring- dale are small, Ward said. The bigger ones are usually caused by contractors accidentally hitting a line, he said.

Sometimes contractors don’t have proper supervision onsite at a job or try to dig through an easier route to avoid trees and difficult terrain and hit a line, Ward said. Other times, lines can be mismarked or contractors want to get a job done as quickly as possible, he said.

“That’s why you never get in a rush,” Ward said.