The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Fix of Regional Water Authority system a real challenge
Utility spent nearly $15 million to repair leaky pipes
When officials with the South Central Connecticut Regional Water Authority look back at 2018, they will do so with a quiet pride at a job well done.
The year began at a much more frenzied pace as the quasi-public utility undertook a challenging project: The $14 million fix of a tunnel and pipe system that brings water from the authority’s largest reservoir to a treatment facility in North Branford.
Making the necessary repairs to the system required the creation of a temporary bypass system to allow water to continue to flow from Lake Galliard to the treatment facility. While the temporary bypass was in use, permanent repairs were made to the pipe and tunnel system.
Larry Bingaman, president and chief executive officer of the RWA, said the project, which became known as The Great Hill Tunnel and Pipeline, was “one of the most important infrastructure projects ever undertaken” by the quasipublic utility company.
“It was certainly one of the largest emergency restorations,” Bingaman said. “What could have been a multi-year infrastructure project was completed in a matter of months, and without any water quality issues or service interruptions
“It was certainly one of the largest emergency restorations.” Larry Bingaman, president and CEO of the South Central Connecticut Regional Water Authority
to the hundreds of thousands of local residents we serve. The Great Hill Tunnel and Pipeline restoration project is not only a marvel of engineering, but a shining example of our work as an agile and innovative water utility.”
Some parts of the permanent system are 90 years old and authority officials had been aware of leaking within the tunnel system since the 1970s.
But the sense of urgency to make the necessary repairs increased exponentially last October. That’s when Authority officials discovered a leak in the system’s 48-inch cast
iron pipes, some of which were buried 30 feet beneath the ground.
Sixty percent of the water the RWA brings to customers each day comes from Lake Galliard. Authority officials were concerned that a catastrophic failure of of the system, such as a burst pipe could pose health- and safetythreats. The potential health risk would have come from having to quickly shift for the Lake Galliard system to the one that is used to draw water from Lake Whitney in Hamden.
Ted Norris, the RWA’s vice president of asset management, said late last year the discovery of the leak was “a real game changer” that necessitated quick and decisive action.
Large volumes of water spewing out of the pipe could have conceivably damaged homes and businesses located downhill for the delivery system.
“We are on a can’t fail mission on this project,” Norris said last December after the RWA Representative Policy Board gave its approval for the repairs.
But fixing the leak was no easy task. The delivery network of pipes that brings the water from Lake Galliard to the treatment plant climbs a steep hill and is buried beneath Tilcon Connecticut’s North Branford quarry.
The source of the leak, according to Orville Kelly, the authority’s capital construction lead for the project, was a weight belt that a diver working inside the cast iron pipe lost in a 1973 accident that nearly killed the man.
“He (the diver) came to the point in the system where the tunnel meets the cast iron pipe,” Rose Gavrilovic, the Authority’s director of capital planning and delivery, said describing the circumstances surrounding the accident. “The velocity of the water coming from the tunnel got him stuck in the pipe.”
Over time, Kelly said, the stainless steel buckle on the weight belt caused a chemical reaction that resulted in the corrosion of the pipe. By last October, he said, water was leaking from the hole in the pipe at a rate of 60 gallons per minute.
“If the buckle had been made of any other metal than stainless steel, we do not believe this (leak) would have happened,”Kelly said.
Construction of the bypass got under way in December 2017. Repairs to the permanent system got started during January 2018 and were completed in April.
Gavrilovic said about 150 feet of pipe waws replaced in the area where the leak occurred. Another 150 feet of structural liner was installed around the section of pipe that runs under the Tilcon quarry.
“The liner is supporting pipe that is structurally sound,” said Dan Doyle, an RWA spokesman . “We chose to install it because this area is difficult to access, so while we were working on repairs we made this additional improvement to harden the infrastructure for the future.”
Once the repairs were made, contractors working for the authority then spent May and much of June restoring the environment around the work area.
Kelly said fixing the problem involved coordinating the efforts of a half dozen companies. During peak periods, as many as 40 people at a time were working on the project, Kelly said.
“It was important that everybody was able to work well together,” he said.
The repair and replacement project was not without its problems, though. Gavrilovic said weather related issues caused the project to come in about 6 percent over budget or at $14.9 million.
Pumps and generators used to make the bypass system work had to work harder in colder weather to keep it running. That mean that the generators had to be refueled multiple times each day, according to Kelly.