(Reading time: 4 minutes)
It took me a while to check out the explanation given to Staunton City Council about the August 14 water-main break (viewable here), but it’s still worth watching, if only to see a notable example of a kicking-the-can-down-the-road approach to municipal governance.
The presentation August 28 by public works director Dave Irvin included a detailed timeline, lots of numbers and appropriate praise for his department’s “all hands on deck” rapid response and hard work. The 16-inch cast-iron pipe that ruptured was at least 80 years old, shattering with such force that it blew itself apart and “self-excavated,” with water rushing out of the trench it created at a rate of 16 million gallons a day—four times its normal flow. Thanks to the department’s quick action, with valve closures starting within an hour of the estimated break, perhaps a million gallons were discharged into the surrounding neighborhood.
But what caused the break? “We don’t know,” Irvin said, contending that “the possible causes are many.” The extensive damage, he added, made a postmortem impossible. A council member chimed in with a helpful metaphor: drive a car long enough, and sooner or later you can expect a flat tire—you just won’t know when, or which tire will go, until it happens.
It all was, the consensus appeared to be, an act of God. Something you just have to roll with.
But here’s the thing: the August 14 incident was Staunton’s second flat tire over the past couple of decades. A 2007 break in Cherry Hill also ruptured a 16-inch main, also one of cast iron, and also described as the result of “unknown causes.” That break took more than 12 hours to shut off and resulted in a slew of state-issued regulatory changes, directly contributing to the quick resolution this time around. That’s the good outcome. The bad outcome is that we’re still accepting the excuse that such breaks are because of “unknown causes.”
We know the cause. Cast-iron pipes, which were standard issue when much of Staunton’s water works were built, are brittle. The industry standard is a 100-year life span. Nearly half of the city’s water is supplied by the North River Reservoir, which is tapped by a 20-inch cast-iron pipe threaded through a 6-foot tunnel burrowed through Lookout Mountain, then connected to a 14-mile cast-iron pipeline that runs to the city. Next year will mark the centennial of that project—100 years since a system with a 100-year life span was completed. Miles more of cast-iron pipes of varying vintage and various diameters, including 16- 14- and 12-inch, run throughout the city.
Moreover, the karst topography that underlies our region is not kind to brittle systems. The 6-foot tunnel that once buffered the 20-inch main is no more, gradually settling around the pipe over the past 10 decades. That much was publicly known at least a decade ago, when Nancy Sorrells wrote about it in an apparent response to proposed fracking in the George Washington National Forest that alarmed city officials because of its threat to a crucial water supply. The fracking threat retreated, but the land continues to shift and settle nonetheless, putting more stress on a water distribution system that is hurtling toward its past-due date.
The flat-tire metaphor may be reassuring when all four tires are brand-new. In this case, that’s hardly the case. These tires have been hitting the road for many, many decades, and we’ve now had two flats. Every bit of Lincoln’s head—and then some—rides above a non-existent tread on the other two.
Why do people drive on bald tires? Usually because they can’t afford new ones, which may be why Staunton’s city council has been unwilling to take a closer look at an increasingly untenable situation. Although a city council member asked Irvin how much cast-iron pipe is out there, he didn’t get an answer—quite possibly because an exact number is unknown. But what is known is that replacing cast-iron mains with more flexible ductile-iron pipe is expensive. Hugely expensive. The Richmond Avenue project, for example, will replace less than two miles of a 6-inch cast-iron main and a 10-inch cast-iron main—because of their frequent breaks—with a single 16-inch ductile-iron main; that project is budgeted at $13 million. The city overall has more than 150 miles of pipeline.
Faced with such an imponderable financial overhang, council members have been only too willing to avoid asking the hard questions. And Irvin made it easier for them, announcing at the outset, “It would be great if we could predict breaks like this. We can’t.” Narrowly speaking, he’s correct.
But what we can predict, as we drive down the road on our well-worn slicks, is that more breaks are coming. They’ll come more frequently and sooner than we expect. And we really won’t be able to continue insisting that their causes are unknown.
Looking askance 