City Council approves emergency repairs for water main break, hears plans for pipe testing
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Wichita boil water advisory
A major Wichita water main break on Oct. 7, 2021, led the Kansas Department of Heath and Environment to place the city and others that purchase water from its system under a boil water advisory.
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The 42-inch water main near I-135 and 18th Street that burst on Oct. 7, resulting in a 36-hour water boil advisory that closed schools and some Wichita restaurants, will remain out of service for now, city engineer Gary Janzen told the Wichita City Council during its meeting Tuesday morning.
But the city has lined up a company that specializes in the internal testing of larger diameter pipes that will be in Wichita sometime in the first quarter of next year to help the city decide what it will need to do to prevent another break.
In the meantime, the Wichita City Council on Tuesday affirmed the city manager’s “public exigency approval” issued on Oct. 14 to repair the broken main using Dondlinger Construction, the city’s on-call contractor. “Public exigency” allows the manager to approve work in urgent situations where a formal bid process would cause too much delay.
Because the main distributes water to a large swath of northeast Wichita, Janzen said, it needed to be repaired immediately to ensure adequate water supply and fire protection.
A preliminary estimate for repairs performed so far is $250,000, Janzen told the council.
The city has also hired Professional Engineering Consultants of Wichita to perform a “condition assessment” on the remaining pipe in the area of the break. That group will evaluate the steel reinforcement in the pipes, test the soil in the area and estimate repair costs.
“There’s some experts in this field that have been engaged and are conducting an analysis now and doing some forensic testing on the pipe that broke,” Janzen said. “They’re working on soil analysis right now, and what that does is it potentially could pinpoint a case for the failure in that immediate area... We don’t know the results of that yet.”
The design and construction of any additional repairs would be solicited through a formal bid process, Janzen said.
Keeping the pipe shut down for now won’t impact the water system locally, he said.
“I think that says something about the redundancy and resiliency of our water distribution system and how it’s been designed over the years,” he told the council. “This time of year, there’s less water demand, which helps. We’ve seen some rain, which helps too. But as of right now, we’re going to leave this line out of service until we can finish the analysis of the pipeline, especially in the area of the highway, looking at the soils and developing a better plan for moving forward.”
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