System break leaves Lind without water

LIND — Aging equipment caused a leak that required shutting off water to the entire town of Lind last week.

Project engineer Pat Sheehy said construction crews were replacing water lines on Seventh and I streets, work that required shutting off water to customers on Seventh Street. City public works crews said they had turned off the water to Seventh Street, Sheehy said, “but when the contractor shut off the water, the water wasn’t off.”

City officials said the break was discovered Tuesday and the water was shut off Wednesday. All buildings were out of water by Thursday, and the water was turned back on Friday afternoon.

Sheehy said the valves that connected the Seventh Street section of the line to the city’s water reservoir are old and weren’t working properly. “Part of this project is to replace some very old infrastructure,” he said.

“There were wider impacts and outages than they planned,” Sheehy said. Since the shutoff couldn’t be isolated to the area where the lines were being replaced, water to the entire town had to be shut off.

Construction crews had been planning to replace water connections on Seventh Street in phases to minimize the impact, but the need to shut off the water city-wide meant all connections along the street had to be replaced at once. “They (construction crews) worked straight through one of the nights,” Sheehy said.

“As you can imagine, it was quite a busy week,” he said.

Cheryl Schweizer can be reached via email at [email protected].