CORNWALL, Ontario – On Wednesday, Oct. 18, the City of Cornwall’s waterworks crews fixed a broken watermain at the intersection of Cumberland and Fourth St. W. It was the 23rd broken watermain of 2017.
The watermain that broke was a ductile iron pipe. According to Bill de Witt, the City of Cornwall’s Division Manager for Municipal Works, 99 percent of the pipes that break are of this type.
In all, there is 280 km of pipes in the Cornwall water system, 72 km of which have been identified as needing replacement. de Witt said that most often breaks occur in these iron pipes because of age and that some of those pipes are around 100-years-old. The number of breaks so far this year is less than last year, and roughly a quarter of the breaks that occurred in 2015.
He explained that it depended on the location and circumstance, but that he believed that it cost the City an average of $7, 000 every time a watermain broke. In other words, the broken watermains that the City has had to repair so far this year have cost around $161, 000.
de Witt said that if the pipe was simply replaced, the cost would be about the same, but that this does not take into account the inconvenience surrounding a watermain break. Earlier in October, the area of Vincent Massey Dr. and Tollgate Rd. experienced multiple watermain breaks in the space of a week, an event which left residents in that area without water for days and induced the City to dispatch its Urgent Command Centre to the area to distribute bottled water.
Broken iron watermains are often replaced with new plastic pipes, which de Witt says are very unlikely to break.
Existing iron pipes are being re-lined by the City of Cornwall with a plastic lining. de Witt says that the plastic lining greatly increases the pipes’ durability and makes them almost as reliable as the plastic pipes.
So far, the City has re-lined 19 km of pipes, but there remains 136 km of pipe that are un-lined.
de Witt went on to explain that City administration is trying to carefully plan the re-lining/ replacement of water pipes in concert with their roadwork plans.
“We’re trying to be very strategic about it,” he said. “We probably won’t re-line the pipe if we’re going to redo the street above it in the near future.”
In an interview with Seaway News in July the City of Cornwall’s General Manager of Infrastructure and Municipal Works John St. Marseille said that there is a backlog of about $40 million worth of watermains that need to be replaced.
This year, Municipal Works hopes to replace $4 million worth of old watermains. Of that money, the City of Cornwall is providing between $1 – $2 million and senior levels of government are providing over $2 million.
However, St. Marseille said that this rate of replacement is not enough.
“We would need to do more to deal with the backlog, because every year we identify more pipes that have reached the end of their lifecycle and need to be replaced,” he said. “There are some pipes in Cornwall that are 100-years-old.
