Service nearly normal after water-line break
Dayton officials seeking solutions to help avoid same issues in future.
Water service for city of Dayton businesses and residents was nearly back to normal Tuesday after a massive water-line break, but city workers will continue with repairs and testing today to try to put the system back to full-speed.
City officials hoped to have full service restored to downtown and several East Dayton neighborhoods by late Tuesday — more than 24 hours after a water main break in Dayton affected thousands of people in the city and Montgomery County.
Two pipes — 36 and 48 inches in diameter — ruptured Monday afternoon beneath Keowee and Ottawa streets, near the Mad River, Dayton City Manager Shelley Dickstein said. Crews discovered that the 36-inch pipe broke while they were attempting to repair the first one, she said.
Water service for about 27,000 customers was affected, she said.
The breaks forced city water department crews into a 24-hour fight to restore service.
After the full shut down Monday, the city refilled its reservoirs, stabilizing the system’s water levels, and officials expected all customers to have full water service by Tuesday morning, Dickstein
said. However, the system was not filling, and staff discovered that a valve that was necessary to keep the area with the broken pipes shut down was instead allowing water into that area system, she said. That meant staff had to do a “workaround” and cut in a 24-inch line to re-route water around that problem area.
City staff spent much of Tuesday on that work, she said, and they activated a “booster” at the pumping station closest to the two reservoirs that serve the high-pressure area. Those customers, located in the Belmont and Patterson Park, received some relief by late Tuesday afternoon, Dickstein said.
“What that did was tremendously increase pressure and allow for some refiling to continue to occur,” she said.
City crews will finish repairs on the 24-inch line and refill the two reservoirs, Dickstein said. Once pressurization is stabilized, the city will take samples that the Ohio EPA will test, and if there are no issues, the boil advisories could be lifted today.
Water service at Miami Valley Hospital and Grandview Medical Center was affected at the start of the day Tuesday. Officials at both hospitals said the water shortage did not affect patient care, and they distributed bottled water to patients and staff.
Miami Valley also switched to its water reserve supplies, said Sharon D. Howard, director of site communications for Premier Health.
Grandview took additional precautions, like turning off water and ice machines, as well as notifying staff of the break. Because Grandview did not lose water pressure, the facility was able to continue sterilization for surgery.
Montgomery County government buildings in downtown Dayton will be open today, although all the county government buildings downtown will be under a boil advisory when they reopen, according to a release from Brianna Wooten, county communications director.
Water pressure was impacted by the breaks at the County Administration Building, Reibold Building, the Court Complex, Juvenile Court and Coroner’s Office.
Water pressure returned to the Montgomery County Jail by Tuesday. On Monday, the jail worked with the county and emergency management agency officials to ensure the jail continued to function and the inmates had water, said Christine Ton, media director with the Montgomery County Sheriff ’s Office. Inmates were provided water bottles, she said.
Patterson Park resident Peter Hein, who lives on Buckingham Road, said his home lost a significant amount of water pressure about 4 p.m. Monday, and it had not improved by 1 p.m. Tuesday. He and his family used buckets of water from his swimming pool to flush their toilets because the water tanks were taking about an hour to refill.
Hein and others in the neighborhood said it’s unfortunate that this is the third major water disruption in about a year-and-a-half, but they understand that the pipes are old and said the city’s doing the best that it can.
“It’s an inconvenience, but I’m not up in arms about it,” he said. “I have a pool in the back, so I have hundreds of gallons of water that I can flush my toilet with.”
Monday’s incident was the third large water main break in Dayton since February 2019. A recent Dayton Daily News investigation found that the city of Dayton loses between 16% and 30% of its treated drinking water to leaks throughout the network — between 3.68 billion and 6.9 billion gallons a year, according to what the city described as a very rough estimate.
The city’s water department spends 47% of its annual $52 million budget toward pumping water, treating and distributing it, officials recently told the Dayton
Daily News. The rest is available for line replacement and upgrades.
Several years ago the city started investing in its aging water and sewer infrastructure, as many of the city’s more than 2,000 miles of pipes have been in place since the 1800s. Commissioners agreed to spend $15 million per year to replace or repair 1% of the system’s infrastructure annually, with more than half the money going toward the city’s more than 800 miles of water pipes.
There’s been a reduction in overall water main breaks in recent years as a result of the city’s “aggressive” approach to address the aging infrastructure, said Aaron Zonin, the city’s deputy water director. The city had 124 water main breaks last year — excluding the February 2019 incident.
“All of us are relieved that we started replacing 1% of our pipes every year,” City Commissioner Matt Joseph said Tuesday. “Our engineers saw this coming, they saw that the age (of the pipes) was up there and that we had pipes that were going to be coming up for replacement one way or the other.”
The city can invest in the infrastructure because the water utility has taken on hardly any debt for many years, he said. So the city was able to take on some debt to afford the repairs, he said. Commissioners in January also raised rates to pay for the improvement.
Dayton will continue making improvements in an effort to avoid disruptions the sizes of Monday’s water main break, he said.
“We all sympathize with our residents,” Joseph said. “In fact, I live in the (Patterson Park) area, we don’t have very good pressure still. We realize that it’s annoying.”
The city’s water is distributed to some 400,000 people, including about 250,000 people in Montgomery County outside of the city of Dayton.