A mysterious water main break that has eluded Olds officials for about a year has finally been fixed.According to Scott Chant, the town's director of operational services, the leakage site was at Highway 27 and 65 Avenue and was fixed on Feb. 27.No homes lost their water supply due to the leak.Following repairs, another water main break was found on 54 Street east of 55 Avenue this week.That leak was fixed on March 5, Chant said.About a year ago, the wastewater treatment plant and regional waste management transfer station servicing Olds lost water pressure.The plant lost water completely about five weeks ago.“We were stumped on what was causing it,” Chant said.However, it took a while for town workers to locate the leak because it was not immediately visible. Normally, water would be found on the surface of a roadway.“The one they (came) across on Sunday, it was physically coming out of the guy's yard,” Chant said. “Those are easier to find because it's physically coming to the top of the ground and running into the ditch.”At a council meeting on Feb. 24, he described locating the leak as finding a needle in a haystack. When Chant came to work and saw steam rising from the storm ditch near the intersection of Highway 27 and 65 Avenue on a frigid morning in mid-February, that pinpointed a possible location.Chant explained that the steam was condensation from water running out of the pipes. The temperature that day was about -30 C and the water is only about 5 C to 10 C.“When you have steam rising from the storm ditch, in -30, it means there's water running. There's new water running down that ditch,” he said. “That's what told us that there was definitely something seriously wrong up toward that intersection somewhere.”They dug into the ground and found the leak. What they also found was a section of the pipe missing, eroded away.“The corrosion and just the wear of the water, once it got a hole in the pipe, it just kept eroding at the pipe and eroding at the pipe and actually physically deteriorated the entire pipe,” Chant said.“It was about a two-foot section there that was totally gone,” he continued.Once the pipes were repaired, water still did not reach the wastewater plant. Chant said crews dug up the leak site again and found rocks about six metres down the line blocking the flow. They cleared the rocks but still, no water reached the plant.Chant said they had to thaw frozen pipes nine metres away from the original repair site before water was restored.The leak raised the town's water consumption, which affects how much water the town must purchase from the Mountain View Regional Water Commission at $1.30 per cubic metre.However, Chant said it's hard to provide an accurate estimate of the water volume lost because the size of the leak prior to its discovery is [email protected]
