Utilities crews are busy again as dry conditions have led to several water main and water line breaks, including one that flooded a lower floor of Kansas University’s Spencer Museum of Art on Wednesday morning.
“It’s picking back up again because of the weather, soil conditions and drought that’s going on,” said Jeanette Klamm, a city utilities programs manager.
Some rain last week helped ease conditions that led to dry soil and broken pipes, but city and other local crews have had their hands full this week, with a major break Tuesday near 19th and Harper streets and the one on the KU campus on Mississippi Street behind Dyche Hall. Klamm said city crews on Wednesday repaired two other line breaks, including one on Hilltop Drive near Hillcrest School.
The Mississippi Street break, which occurred at 2 a.m., caused water to seep into two bottom floors of the Spencer Museum, said Joe Monaco, a KU spokesman, and KU closed the museum Wednesday.
Water that flooded into the street caused a bulk of the damage on the building’s bottom floor, which houses the Murphy Art and Architecture Library, Monaco said. A smaller amount of water entered the next floor up, which is home to workshops, classrooms and a photo studio, but no major equipment was damaged. The building’s third and fourth floors, which house artwork, were not damaged, he said.
“All the artwork in the building is completely intact,” he said.
Monaco said the museum would be closed again today, and KU officials would evaluate and decide whether to open Friday. The library in the museum’s basement will remain closed the rest of the week, he said.
KU facilities workers were in the area trying to make repairs, and Mississippi Street was closed near Memorial Drive most of Wednesday.
Klamm said the soil condition was one factor in causing the breaks. The other is high demand on the system. With so little rainfall more people than usual are irrigating their lawns. “When you are pushing that much water through those pipes, if there’s a weakness, it may cause that weakness to break,” she said.
During the drought, the city has advised residents to use measures such as watering lawns in the late evening or night hours and to repair dripping faucets and leaking toilets to keep extra water from running.
“Just be mindful of where you are using your water and try to be as conserving as possible,” Klamm said.
Comments
mikekt 9 months, 3 weeks ago
There are such things as expansive clay soils that expand when wet, moving foundation walls, lifting basement floors up, pushing water mains up ( when wet as a sponge full of water might swell ) & dropping them when they dry out & shrink back to a lesser volume .
Just walk around & notice the dirt on the surface of the ground . It's cracking everywhere unwatered & shrinking .
Part of this is probably the age of the pipe, it's size , joint types & how well it is anchored for thrust, if heavy water use is an issue ?
Corrosive soils, corrosive sewer leaks.... & stray electricity, can also weaken pipes .
Newer pipes ( post 1960 ) are made mostly of ductile iron. Ductile iron is flexible, it usually has rubber gasket mechanical joints that will flex some, as opposed to older pipes ( 1920s to 1960s or so pipe ) with poured in place Leadite Sulfur Cement joints ( that replaced lead use in water pipe joints pre 1920s or so ) . That change happen differently in various areas.
Ductile iron that has a proper exterior coating & good interior lining can take allot of abuse .
Water systems also experience high breakages in the winter, when the water temperature drops below 39 degrees, causing the water to start expanding towards icing, while the metal pipes are still contracting in size . REALLY !
Water temperature changes are also a big problem with Leadite joints, as they do not expand & contract at the same rate as the cast iron pipes do, causing breakage at the hub & Bell shaped pipe joints .
mikekt 9 months, 3 weeks ago
Note to author .
Next time try getting the general age of the pipe, the size of the pipes in interior diameter, the type of the pipe that broke ( pit cast, spun cast, ductile iron, reinforced concrete, etc ) .
How a pipe breaks ( did it blow out a hole in the side, did it split down one side, did it break at a joint, on one, or both sides of a joint , did it blow into two pieces length wise ? ) can tell you allot about what contributed to the failure . REALLY !
Dead pipes don't keep secrets well ! They get dug up !
It should should come as no shock to anyone, to discover that parts of Lawrence, like many midwestern towns it's age, have some evolving fresh water plumbing pipe issues, that like KCs problems with their system, ( that dates to the 1880s, ) that things are going to get worse & will have to reach a certain point of failure mode before KC, will replace 1/2 to 2/3s, of it's several thousands of miles of fresh water mains .
That will be a major public repair issue to come in KC, that is already on TV, nightly.
Lawrence is just the next up !
Just about every street in Lawrence or KC, have water mains in or near them, that are aging .
Liberty275 9 months, 3 weeks ago
You seem to know a lot about pipe.
mikekt 9 months, 3 weeks ago
Do a Google search for : Deteriorating Buried Infrastructure Management Challenges and Strategies . It is a May 2002 report from the EPA about our national water piping systems . You too can be a pipe guru (?) ! No secret initiations required & you don't have to send any money to me, thank you ! .......HA,HA,HA ! They haven't hid it, the story, from anybody, per say. It's just not of "as big of an instant media story.....yet", or as sexy to the media, as an unfortunate death, taxes, government scandals, the Olympics, burglars that break (?) into homes...... thru unlocked doors ( is that called breaking in ? ) , car crashes that are fatal, people being life flighted by helicopter, the drought, it has little to do with partisan daily politics,.........Yet !
It is just starting to dawn on most folks that water lines don't last forever & that a city utility can't be everywhere at once fixing them all at once when the work load out numbers the people to do it, that a city utility budgets for,.....let alone to straight off replace hundreds of miles of worn out buried water mains, until the get terribly consistently broken,..... as in repeatedly, frequently, expensively, mostly one at a time !
A good bit of KCs system is 100 years or older "pit cast pipes",.... & they are a type of pipe that might be "roughly estimated" for 100 to 140 years of dependable service ( or make a guess ? ) & some of the newer "spun cast pipes", don't even last that long ! Especially if they have "Leadite Sulfur Cement Sealed Pipe Joints" .
Good News for people who like fixing or replacing water mains for a living .
Job Security is on it's way & built into many midwestern systems, near you !
oxymoron 9 months, 3 weeks ago
Just another big reason we don't need to build the Self-Fritzel dream palace right now. We need to spend any funds we have on our aging infrastructure.
mikekt 9 months, 3 weeks ago
Yes to that,.... or start a funding plan & fund it .
Don't get caught with your pants down, as KCMO is, being under a 2 Billion Dollar Federal Mandated order to fix their combined street catch basin & septic sewer systems in the Brush Creek Basin & suddenly discovering that their water mains are past the tipping point, age wise, for having major numbers of failures occur daily .
Of course most buried water mains are built in or cross right of ways where they thread thru everything else that is buried down there .
Gas Mains & individual gas service pipes, sewers & building branches,"bright wires" for street lights, telephone, cable / internet & fiberoptic ducts, stop light pavement sensors & wiring, buried street car tracks that have to be cut out .
That is why they have the "going to dig telephone numbers". It is hellishly expensive to rip out a main communications duct or dangerous to puncture / snag a gas main or grab a high voltage buried cable .
Many water mains are tapped, for individual building services that go off when those sections of mains are shut down, so they have to be supported during major planed replacement or relining of pipe jobs .
Old water main valves that haven't been operated for many years can fail to be operable to close or fully close when needed or leak badly around the stems in winter causing ice on streets .
Saw a story out of Wichita on TV about a neighborhood main that was a frequent breaker .
The frequency of outages of water has to get obnoxiously expensive or the breaks very damaging, before it justifies a replacement of the whole pipe, as an expense !
90sgirl 9 months, 3 weeks ago
OMG, this is tragic.
kansasdaughter 9 months, 3 weeks ago
The water that flooded the two lower floors did not come from the street, it came through the steam tunnels. If you don't know what happened, don't make it up as you go along, George.
mikekt 9 months, 3 weeks ago
Yea ! Steam is just another dangerous underground thing for people to deal with .
Obviously, it is deadly hot !
Thanks for the facts !
Based on your report i assume that this was KUs in house water piping that broke ?
kansasdaughter 9 months, 3 weeks ago
I know that it was a 10" water main and that KU facilities workers fixed it. The city wasn't involved at all.
Liberty275 9 months, 3 weeks ago
More breaking news: Another main broke at 19th and haskell this morning.
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