Cause of water pipe failure still a mystery
Officials are still trying to determine what caused a water pipe near the intersection of Grogan’s Mill Road and Woodlands Parkway to burst May 17, flooding the intersection and closing it off for several hours.
Officials are still trying to determine what caused a water pipe near the intersection of Grogan’s Mill Road and Woodlands Parkway to burst May 17, flooding the intersection and closing it off for several hours.
The 30-inch wide pipe, which was installed about a year ago by the San Jacinto River Authority, was expected to have a 30year lifetime. While the leak was stopped May 17 by shutting off the water running through the pipe, crews were still working Thursday to clear debris and mud from around it, said Groundwater Reduction Plan Division Manager Mark Smith. Once the debris was clear, the SJRA began investigating the pipe to determine what caused the break.
“This type of pipeline usually does not just fail,” Smith said. “It was pressure tested well beyond operating pressure, and there were no pressure spikes that might have caused the problem.”
The pipe is part of more than 50 miles of pipeline installed throughout Montgomery County for the Groundwater Reduction Plan, a response to the state mandate to significantly reduce the county’s reliance on groundwater. The system started pumping surface water from Lake Conroe to The Woodlands and parts of the county in 2015. It included the installation of the pipeline and the construction of a water treatment plant on Lake Conroe and a pumping station at a cost of nearly half a billion dollars.
The pipe that broke serviced six water plants in south Montgomery County, but Smith said that there was no interruption in water service, since all of the buildings in the area are also connected to well water.
Since the broken section of pipe will likely need to be removed and replaced, Smith said that pipeline may be out of service until this week.
Smith said SJRA plans to bring representatives from the pipe’s manufacturer to investigate the break and determine if there were some flaw in the product.
With 50 miles of this same type of pipe installed throughout the county, Smith said that this unexpected break has raised concern over the reliability of the rest of the pipeline.
“We definitely are concerned,” Smith said. “Once we determine what the cause of this failure was, we’ll develop a strategy for testing the rest of the system to see if it might exist elsewhere.”
Although both northbound lanes and one of the southbound lanes of Grogan’s Mill Road were reopened to traffic, Montgomery County Precinct 3 Commissioner James Noack’s office is planning to fully assess the damage caused to the roadway by the water.