PWSD 3 Worked All Night on Water Outage

A middle-of-the-night call reporting a water outage turned into a nearly 12-hour job to restore running water to Public Water Supply District #3 customers in the Burnham area. At approximately 2:30 a.m. on October 20, director John Sullivan took the first call reporting an outage. More calls of interruption of water service poured in as the hours progressed. All told, the water main break affected 20% of PWSD #3’s customers. 

The first task in fixing the outage was to find the break. Locating the problem was key to fixing it because of challenges unique to rural water districts, Sullivan told Howell County News. There are close to 300 miles of water main pipes in the district, and finding the leak was the proverbial needle in a haystack. 

“If a water main breaks, you have to look for the problem,” Sullivan said, “You’ve just gotta find the leak.”

As the calls reporting outages flooded the office, water district staff members tracked outage locations with pins on a map to narrow down the area to be searched. This tracking process lasted from 2:30 to 6:00 a.m. Once they headed out to search, the problem was suspected to be in an 8 square mile area around Highway Z and US Highway 63. 

There are only four full-time and one part-time staff members at the water district, and with the help of some additional manpower, the workers walked the line on foot searching for the break. 

“I walked from Highway 76 all the way to AA Highway,” Sullivan said, “That’s pretty good for a 72-year-old man.”

Eventually the leak was found to be “literally in the middle of the woods.” What used to be a right-of-way had overgrown with trees in the 26 years since the line was installed. The break was a 6-inch main line that had been losing 600 gallons of water per minute. 

Once the leak was located at approximately 1:00 p.m., repair work began and the water district was operating normally by 6:00 p.m. During the outage a boil advisory was in effect for those whose water was still functioning. 

Despite what was surely a stressful 16-hour workday, Sullivan only had words of praise for his workers and for water district customers.

“Customers were fantastic,” he said, “From the beginning, they were calling offering to help and giving us encouragement.”

The only areas affected by the boil advisory were those on Z Highway and the Burnham/Lost Camp communities. The advisory was lifted on Thursday morning, October 21.