Tuesday, July 11, 2000
Water pipes lead to wave of
problems
Abilene works to fix old
lines one at a time
By Samuel Segrist
Reporter-News Staff Writer
It isn’t exactly glory work.
Red ceramic pieces of an old sewer line
lay along a trench in an alley between Palm and Poplar streets.
Dogs, the only spectators available, stared through chain-link
fences and occasionally yapped at the water workers laboring in
and out of the freshly dug 4-foot hole.
Fewer jobs are more important to a city.
Even though it’s mostly hidden, the
infrastructure that brings water to Abilene is an underground
correlation to the city it serves. Some pieces represent the latest
in technology; some pipes haven’t seen the sun since Prohibition.
The work on the system never ends.
The water crew in the alley connected the
new line — the old red tile was replaced with PVC pipe —
and hid it with the recently removed dirt. The trench was then
covered with white lime to harden the surface, and the workers
moved on to another section.
Another 20 feet in the city’s annual
campaign to replace 20,000 feet of water and sewage lines.
The pipes
According to the water department’s
own history, the first water lines in the city were laid in 1885,
two years after Abilene was incorporated. Water director Dwayne
Hargesheimer said the oldest line follows Buffalo Gap Road and
has been there since 1921.
At that time, Taylor County’s population
was fewer than 25,000 people — less than one-quarter of Abilene’s
present-day population. The Jazz Age had just started, and the
Key City had recently finished work on its latest prize —
Lake Abilene.
The water department took on the responsibility
of building the treatment plant and line to bring water from outside
Buffalo Gap to Abilene.
The materials used at the time were typical,
Hargesheimer said. Actually, the metal used may remind people
more of a pipeline than the plastic polymers workers usually install
today.
The old 22-inch pipe is sand-cast iron.
Workers joined the different sections by stuffing filler around
the joint and then pouring molten lead to seal the work. It doesn’t
pose a health risk because the lead doesn’t contact the water,
Hargesheimer said.
“That’s all they had then,”
he said.
The pipe causes other problems, though.
Metal joints don’t provide much flexibility, and a continually
shifting ground can stress the lines past the breaking point.
Especially recently.
As the dry ground creaked under the sun,
the water department spent a large part of the winter and spring
trying to patch leaks.
The old line from Lake Abilene had the worst
break this year. In April, a joint split near the intersection
of South 32nd Street and Buffalo Gap Road. The department estimated
750,000 gallons spilled out before workers could shut it off.
June rains have kept the ground from moving
as much, giving repair crews a rest, water officials said.
Pipes have changed since the 1920s. The
downtown area had its plumbing redone in 1956 and the city installed
cast iron pipes with rubber seals. And the city system now has
a pipeline made from a composite of materials.
Hargesheimer said 4 percent of the city’s
lines are concrete. Concrete was the material of choice for the
older, larger lines from the reservoirs supplying Abilene. Both
the lines from Hubbard Creek Reservoir use layered cement and
concrete. About 30 percent of Abilene’s lines are still cast
iron.
Another 12 percent are made up of cement
impregnated with asbestos. Hargesheimer cringes at the potential
panic stirred by the mere mention of asbestos; he is quick to
point out it’s harmless to water customers.
The Texas Natural Resource Conservation
Commission keeps tabs on asbestos in the water supply. A spokesman
for the state agency said asbestos can be a problem, but only
if it gets into the water in high dosages. And, he says, generally
it doesn’t.
The city lab reports there are no detectable
levels of asbestos in the water supply. State regulations limit
the amount to 7 million fibers per liter, defining one fiber as
10 micrometers in length or longer.
The water supply also serves as its own
protector. The hard water in the city system coats the inside
of the pipes, so the pipes themselves don’t dissolve, said
Mike Michaud, lab technician supervisor at the Abilene water laboratory.
The city has not installed the asbestos-lined
pipe, which was more dangerous to the workers making it than the
people drinking out of it, since the 1970s.
The remaining 54 percent is modern PVC pipe.
The plastic is cheaper and more flexible than its older counterparts.
Hargesheimer said the water department has rarely installed any
other type of pipe in the past few years.
The plants
In 1932, Abilene boosted a beleaguered water
supply with the addition of Kirby Lake. Then the city went cheap.
The decision shows how one move can affect the city system for
decades.
The Lake Abilene treatment plant, installed
a decade earlier, had filters capable of rapidly producing drinkable
water. Kirby water was instead pumped into two holding tanks.
Workers waited for the raw lake water to settle, then added some
chlorine and pumped it to the public.
“I have no idea why they did that then,”
Hargesheimer said, adding that the resulting taste couldn’t
have been good.
Today, Lake Kirby supplies only the city’s
golf courses, and the water department has mothballed the treatment
plant. Hargesheimer said it would take extensive renovations to
transform the facility into a modern plant.
Abilene has three operational treatment
plants capable of producing water, even though the oldest hasn’t
been able to produce much recently. The Lake Abilene plant was
shut off two years ago after the drought took over. When water
comes back, the city can get the plant back up and running.
When that happens, water directors might
instead decide to build a line to the proposed Ivie treatment
plant, which is scheduled to open in the spring of 2002.
The other two plants, Grimes and Northeast,
share the work between Hubbard Creek Reservoir and Lake Fort Phantom
Hill. Combined, the two plants can produce 50 million gallons
a day.
Both plants use filters and have gone through
extensive upgrades to meet ever stricter government requirements.
The water director estimated $20 million has been spent on the
treatment plants and sewer system since 1980.
And with new regulations on the way, Hargesheimer
predicts that even better filters will be installed in the near
future.
Meanwhile, a pipeline to the O.H. Ivie Reservoir
and construction of a treatment plant will begin. The project
gets the priority spot on the water department’s grocery
list, Hargesheimer said.
The people
Repair crew chief Mike Scott has seen the
water system at its most chaotic.
When a large pipe breaks, the released pressure
can send a plume of thousands of gallons 50 feet in the air. The
ground can shake as if it’s in the middle of a prolonged
earthquake, he said.
But the work on this muggy morning —
in the alley between Palm and Poplar streets — was calmer.
“You have to be flexible on this job,” he said.
That ethos runs through the department.
The crew chief is one of 25 people in the department who work
in construction and maintenance.
They’re the most visible of the department’s
work force — seen tearing up city streets to fix a leaky
line or connecting a new customer to water.
They are joined by about 100 other employees
who work in an array of jobs from engineering to treatment and
maintenance. Administrators deal with everything from bookkeeping
to politics. Hargesheimer has testified at several Texas Legislature
policy meetings.
Duties often overlap.
The responsibilities for Linda Simpson,
assistant water director, range from data collection to marketing.
She’s also learned a good deal about public relations in
her role as spokeswoman for the department.
More recently, Simpson and several water
workers have taken on a new role — law enforcement. Last
year several workers were given the authority to hand out citations
to people violating the city’s water ordinance.
The crews haven’t liked the anger generated
from people who feel they’ve been treated unfairly. But,
just like any other work, Simpson says, some years are harder
than others.
“It’s the challenge of always
having to adjust that appeals to people,” she said.
Contact city government writer Samuel
Segrist at 676-6744 or segrists@abinews.com.
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Abilene Reporter-News / Texnews / E.W. Scripps Publications
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