Epcor repairs burst water line that flooded Edmonton’s Rossdale
“Last night, of course, our priority was public safety, isolating the water main and clearing the streets.”
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Epcor is repairing a downtown water supply line that ruptured Monday night, flooding streets down the hill and into the Rossdale neighborhood and the North Saskatchewan River.
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Pipes next to a transmission line erupted around 7:30 p.m. at 99 Avenue and 103 Street, the utility confirmed Tuesday. A powerful jet of water flowed down 103 Street Monday night and pooled around the intersection of Bellamy Hill and Rossdale Road. Drivers struggled to navigate through the damming water at the intersections and dodged through the suddenly emerging water.
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Roads were soon closed by rescue workers and the water was shut off about an hour later. It’s unclear how much water was released and when the repairs will be complete.
“The volume of water for this particular main fracture was slightly larger than what we typically see based on the volume of water flowing through the pipe transmission line running north of Rossdale,” said Kate Kirk, a senior manager at Epcor on Tuesday.
“Last night, of course, our priority was public safety, isolating the water main and clearing the streets.”
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What caused the outbreak is not yet known.
However, major ruptures are more common when temperatures oscillate above and below freezing – exactly the situation the city has been experiencing in recent days. Fractures can also occur with older pipers or with changes in pressure.
“We typically see increased major disruptions around freeze-thaw cycles in the system. Our priority now is to safely complete the repair and get the roads open again,” Kirk said.
That hiatus was compounded Monday night because stormwater catchment basins, although cleared of snow, were frozen over, a city spokesman said.
“City employees have been working closely with Epcor employees since the incident to drain the water as quickly as possible while deploying sanders for safe mobility on roads and sidewalks,” said Val Dacyk, the city’s chief of infrastructure field operations Edmonton. said in an email.
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Epcor spends approximately $40 million annually replacing and maintaining infrastructure, following a plan to fix the oldest or riskiest parts first, and aims to replace 1.7 miles in the city per year.
This includes replacing cast iron pipe with PVC – 90 percent of breakages occur in cast iron pipe – of which there are about 540 kilometers in the city, or about 13 percent of Epcor’s pipe. The utility also plans to install new “cathode protection” or replace the existing one, which means installing a “sacrificial” piece of metal in a pipeline to protect the original pipes from corrosion.
Kirk said major breaks have decreased over the years — 277 in 2022 — but 2017 saw fewer, at 256, according to that newspaper’s archives.
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When asked if this pipe had already been identified as requiring replacement, Kirk said only that there had been no breaks in the past.
“This is a new incident and we will investigate it. We are now focused on immediate repair and from there we can learn what we can figure out.”
In 2019, another disruption in central Edmonton at 109 Street and 104 Avenue turned that intersection into a lake, and another significant disruption at 109 Street and Jasper Avenue in 2018 prompted evacuations.
Epcor’s public predecessor created a long-term plan to reduce outages in 1986 after 1,600 power lines went down that year alone.
Water around Monday’s burst pipe was shut off for a high-rise condo and home until 10:45 a.m. Tuesday. Meanwhile, Epcor provided water jugs.
Apart from calls from the community, the eruption at the plant was detected due to a change in pressure. Anyone who suspects a water line is leaking or bursting can report it to Epcor at 780-412-4500 or call 911.
