News

Leak wastes millions of gallons

By Bill Moss, Published: August 8, 2013

Dr. Chris Coleman was puzzled that the road in front of his veterinary clinic on Haywood Road seemed perpetually wet even during dry spells.

He called the Hendersonville water department, which sent a worker out to look at it. Nothing happened. Six months later, in late 2011 or early 2012, Coleman and his wife, Dr. Mickey Coleman, also a veterinarian at the Haywood Animal Hospital, again called the water department. This time, Chris Coleman spoke with the worker, who told him the water could be coming from a leaking sewer line, a city water line or an old city line that should have been capped off. Two weeks later, a city truck again pulled into the property and workers placed a length of PVC pipe through the bank. The open end poured water into their ditch.
"Dr. Coleman asked what the purpose of the pipe was," the couple said in a six-page narrative they wrote of the water-leak saga. "He was told it was a temporary fix until some other problem developed 'up the road' which might identify the source of the leak. One employee even joked that we could add koi to the little pond that was forming on the other side of the pipe under the driveway into our business."
The small pond that the constant flow of water formed was no laughing matter to the Colemans. They paid a landscape company $10,000 to put in rock riprap to prevent erosion.
Even then, the Colemans worried that the water leak threatened the ditch and could even cause the highway to collapse. They measured the water flow and calculated the volume at 9.2 gallons a minute —4,835,520 gallons a year. Last month, Mickey Coleman reached Natalie Berry, an assistant county engineer, who came out to look at the water pipe and the ditch. Berry came back the next day with two DOT maintenance supervisors. The engineers assured her the bank was OK but they also observed that the water seemed very clean.
"They all requested that I contact (utility director) Lee Smith at the water department because so much clean, clear water was coming out of that pipe and they felt it looked like city water," Coleman said.
It took five weeks, a call to the city manager, a call to state Rep. Chuck McGrady and a visit by a newspaper reporter to spur action.
City Manager John Connet met with Mickey Coleman at the site on July 3. When he didn't call her back, she reached him again on July 16, when he told her the city was waiting on permission from the DOT to dig up the road for the repair. After a call to Rep. McGrady on July 23 and a visit by a reporter two days later, a day when city workers in two pickup trucks also showed up, the city moved to find the problem and fix it.
The fix turned out to be simple.
Smith, the utility director, said Monday that the leak was coming from an old galvanized pipe that is no longer part of the city water system. A valve that was supposed to seal off the water flow was no longer working. Smith sent a crew to Dogwood Forest, where workers located the bad valve and replaced it. The water slowed to a trickle in a few hours and within a day stopped completely.
Smith recalled that a crew was scheduled to fix the problem months ago
"We went out there and the DOT stopped us for some reason," he said. As a quick fix, the crew "sort of elbowed it out to the ditch so it wouldn't undermine the road.... It's just not been a critical repair for us because it was not endangering life or property."
Smith said he thought the city had known about the leak for only nine months or so, not two years. And even though 10 million gallons of wasted water might sound like a lot, the city system has bigger leaks.
"It's not that we like water running on the ground like that but we have had other leaks" of a greater magnitude, he said. City crews one day noticed water bubbling in a creek in Etowah and realized a city line was leaking. "We probably have leaks that are bigger than that we don't even know about," he said. The city system delivers some 7-8 million gallons of treated water a day, he said.
Mickey Coleman said she spoke on Tuesday with Connet, the city manager, who was "beyond nice."
"I asked him first what the problem was and he said it was an old valve that had deteriorated in an old galvanized line," she said. She asked whether the city would reimburse her for the landscaping work she felt was needed to protect her property from the city water pipe output of 13,000 gallons of day. Connet asked her to submit a letter and an itemized bill for the work.
"He said he couldn't promise anything but he said we will look at it and see what we can do," she said.
She said she is encouraged by that but still frustrated that it took outside calls from Raleigh and a visit by the press to get the city's attention.
"They could have paid for the work I did five times over with the water that was wasted on the ground," she said.