By Bruce Karnick
[email protected]

Access to clean water is something we as Hastings residents assume will be there. It’s part of our every day lives, so when it’s not there, people notice. On Monday, April 18, the city was made aware of a water main break in the middle of Sibley Street between Second and Third, and as of Tuesday, that water main was turned off.

Turning off the watermain usually affects a block or more of people Interim Public Works Director Ryan Stempski said on Monday afternoon. “You can imagine we don’t have valves every foot along the mains, right? We usually have them by the block or so. So, that block, we can definitely isolate that particular segment and we can valve off each one and then do the work we need to do.”

That work was scheduled to be started around 8:00 am Tuesday and be completed by that evening provided the are in the right spot of the leak. Water leaks can be tricky because water travels so easily through the path of least resistance. Public works has equipment to help them detect the leak so they have an approximate location.

“We will dig that up starting in the morning, see what we can see and observe,” added Stempski. “Then really we make decisions from there.”

“We don’t know if it is on the water main, we don’t know, if it is on a service. We just kind of get all hands on deck and dig it up, and we prepare for the worst. You’ll probably see some road closure signs for the contractor to safely do their work tomorrow, we hope to have a backfill by tomorrow. But again, no, no guarantees, it’s just these are the things we anticipate, we obviously have to shut down the main on that block. So, there are a few businesses that we have are in the process of handing water shutoff notices, to just let them know in plan that, hey, we’re fixing an emergency repair tomorrow. And you will be without water for a period of time,” explained Stempski.

Why was the water left running and what kid of risk is there for soil to wash out? Stempski explained that.

“We keep an eye on it. If it’s leaking at a rapid pace, wrecking infrastructure, for example, we make we make a different call, right? If it’s a slower leak, that we can plan for an orderly dig and we can get on it the next day, which is what we’re doing here, that’s what we do. Keep people served until that time, and we go in and we fix what we need to and get people back on as soon as we can. But it kind of depends on the particular leak. In that particular situation, we have a lot of rock down there, so it’s different than if you can imagine a road or infrastructure built on soils that can wash and undermine. This is a little different in that we have we have rock in the area. With the rate of the leak and, and the sub surface conditions we have. This is what we’re doing for this particular one. And we’ll be out in the morning,” he said.