Spewing Water Hydrant Mystery Solved

 Thousands of gallons of water were spewing from a fire hydrant along the roadside on S. Concho River St. close to Lake Nasworthy Wednesday afternoon. 

A witness claimed it had been running that way for about three hours, and when she approached a water utilities employee who was parked next to the spewing hydrant, he told her it would take a  $100,000 water truck to pump it all out, too much money for the amount of water the city was losing in that moment.

As LIVE! arrived at the scene there was a customer service employee from the water department standing on the street scratching his head. He was unsure of what the big blue attachment coming off of the yellow hydrant that had all of the water spewing out of it was. “I have no clue what that is,” he said. “But I’m not getting wet to find out.”

At that point LIVE! was left to our own devices, stripped shoes and socks, and waded through the water to investigate what exactly what this water waster was, quickly determining it was a water gauge. The red metal needle inside the gauge window was spinning in rapid circles; its odometer read 9,421 gallons. That's 9,421 gallons of something we all consider precious wasted in a ditch on the side of the road.  

 Meanwhile at the LIVE! world headquarters, Bill Riley, Water Utilities Director, spoke with the editor, explaining the reasons for the spewing fire hydrant.

 “It’s a very unfortunate situation, but the line that goes out there is just a single dead-end line,” he said. “The state requires us to flush those lines to make sure that they are fresh. We monitor the chlorine levels in them and if the chlorine levels drop, we have to flush that water out to keep the chlorine levels up so that it meets standard. It’s unfortunate, but unfortunately we have to do that now.”

Riley explained that this is not part of the maintenance related to upping the chlorine levels in the city water, but rather that it assists in the process.

“After we increase the chlorine levels it helps maintain the residuals in those outlying areas better, so that’s part of the reason we do that, so that we can limit the amount of flushing that we have to do.”

The lines are checked weekly according to Riley, and he says that the hope is to not have to flush the line more than once a month.

Back out by the lake the yellow hydrant continued to spew. A water distribution truck showed up and a young man with a wrench hopped out of the cab, walked over to the hydrant and slowly turned down the flow of water.

“We have to turn the hydrants down slow, because if you just cut one off too fast the amount of water pressure returning to the line could break a main,” he said.

This city water employee was a little more knowledgeable than the first, and shed some light on why the big blue thing was on the hydrant in the first place.

He explained that the blue thing was indeed a water gauge and that it was an old piece of equipment, and the odometer on it is much like a car in that it doesn’t get reset. That would mean that not all of the 9,421 gallons (and counting) of wasted water logged on that gauge was from that specific incident, but from others as well.  

“It’s about 7,000 gallons that came off of this flush though,” the water employee said as he sat the detached water gauge on the tailgate of his truck. At that point it read close to 9,800 gallons in the now motionless, quiet window of the water gauge. Just in the time span that LIVE! was on the scene almost 400 gallons was lost, and this was reported to have been going on for hours before.

Why did the city have to flush so much water?

“Chlorine has a limited shelf life on the water, and so the longer it sits it gets bad,” the knowledgeable water employee said. “We have lab technicians come out and monitor a lot of points throughout the city, hundreds of them. So they notice that these are getting low so when they start getting low we have to flush out and bring some fresh water in, just to prevent people from getting sick.”

Meanwhile, Bill Riley was not sure of how many gallons of water exactly is lost during a “flushing”.

 “We do measure that so we know how much water that we are losing there,” he said. “I don’t know specifically off the top of my head what the number for that is.”

While it is important to keep the water supply safe for citizens, it is also important to conserve water. According to Riley, it seems that at this time the only alternative for that particular water line is to continue on in the same fashion.

“There’s nothing that can be done with that line, the problem is that it just runs out there and stops,” he said. “We are definitely looking at all of the areas where we have those lines. In fact, we have several where we are looping those back so that we don’t have to do that.”

In a looped water line the water never stops flowing.  The design does not allow the water time to accumulate or even have a chance of growing stagnate.

“If you have a line that just dead ends and you don’t have enough use on it at the end of it, then the water basically becomes stale,” Riley explained. “It loses the chlorine residual in it so you have to freshen it. If you have a dead-end line that at the end of it you have enough use, that doesn’t happen. In a looped line the water continues to move and so it always stays fresh. It is a state requirement that you flush those dead end lines, and so to the extent we can limit that we want to. We are looking at that line out there, but there’s just not a lot that we can do with it. Unfortunately, out there it is what it is.”