Water main leak hard to find
PWSA contractors still looking for exact site of rupture
They know it’s about a century old, about four miles long and made of riveted steel.
But contractors Monday had yet to identify precisely where a key water main developed a huge leak, the Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Authority said.
PWSA had not established an exact cause for the rupture, the repair costs or an estimated repair schedule. Contracted workers clustered on Parker Street between Washington and Hill streets in Etna, where they were still excavating to “understand the scope of the needed repair,” PWSA spokesman Will Pickering said in a statement.
He called it “very unlikely” that a fix would be complete by Monday night. The authority first detected a problem a week ago, when water levels at two reservoirs were falling. PWSA has since halted the leakage, isolating the broken section of the 60-inch main connecting the Lanpher reservoir in Shaler with the treatment plant in Aspinwall.
“Due to its age, [the main] is very brittle,” said Mr. Pickering, who called aging infrastructure a definite factor. “In addition to age, water flowing inside the main is highly pressurized, which stresses the pipe.”
He said the same main burst in 2014, and “we did not determine the exact cause of [the] break, other than age.” The latest leak was estimated at about 10,000 gallons a minute, or about 20 percent of PWSA’s average daily production.