Residents near Stikine Avenue, which runs to the ferry terminal, and Cow Alley, one block up from downtown, awoke Friday, Aug. 21, to dry taps. It has become almost a reflex recently to turn to Facebook to look for borough announcements of service interruptions due to water main breaks.

There have been five water main breaks across the borough in August alone. Six if you count that the break at Stikine Avenue that was reported just after midnight had two breaks that had to be fixed several times.

“We actually fixed the Stikine Avenue one three separate times here this morning,” Public Works Director Tom Wetor said last Friday.

Earlier in the week there was a water main break out Zimovia Highway, at most 60 feet away from where a pipe had broken a couple weeks earlier. Wetor said that could indicate that that area could be a new weak point for them, or it could just be a coincidence.

The pipe in Cow Alley had also just been patched in early April, about 30 feet away from this most recent break, according to Wetor.

The Public Works team fixed the pipes near the ferry terminal in about eight hours and the one in the alley behind Cooper’s Corner was done by noon.

But why does it seem like water main breaks are happening so often these days?

There are two types of pipes carrying water below Wrangell streets. There are asbestos concrete pipes — yes, asbestos, used for its corrosion resistance and lighter weight than iron — which were very popular from the 1930s to 1970s, and then there are ductile iron pipes, which were installed in the 1980s.

Many of the older roads in Wrangell — like Stikine Avenue — have water mains made of asbestos concrete that are past their life expectancy, according to Wetor. This is also true of the line beneath Cow Alley.

“When the AC mains, the asbestos concrete, when they blow out, typically they blow out in big sections. Like there will be like a two- or three-foot section that is just destroyed,” Wetor said.

He explained that when those pipes go, they can blast out water at up to 1,500 gallons a minute. 

When the pipe in Cow Alley went, the water flushed out packed gravel around the line, causing the asphalt to collapse where the pipe broke.

Most of the water mains that broke in August were made of asbestos concrete. 

The other kind of pipe, ductile iron, was installed throughout Wrangell in the 1980s at the peak of the state oil-revenue boom, Wetor said. But then that state money dried up, leaving the Wrangell without the funding to complete the transition from the older lines. 

“Ultimately, the state didn’t really have a plan to make up for that shortfall in funding,” he said. “In a lot of ways, we’re 30 years behind the times in getting some of these systems replaced.”

The ductile iron pipes that make up most of the updated system are not without their own issues.

“We probably have more ductile iron pipe in the ground for water mains,” said Amber Al-Haddad, Capital Projects Department director and former director of Public Works, “and we have been seeing early corrosion in the ductile iron pipes, which has been one of our biggest problems for many years.” 

While the iron pipes have the benefit of losing less water when a main breaks — at a couple hundred gallons per minute, rather than over 1,000 — early corrosion of these pipes can lead to widespread leaks that are hard to identify.

There are technologies that can allow for scans of the system to identify links, but they are costly. Al-Haddad said they were able to do a scan in 2017 with the help of the Alaska Rural Water Association, which identified four major leaks that they hadn’t known about.

“If we don’t have experience with water main breaks or sewer issues, you know, we have to assume that the infrastructure is good,” Al-Haddad said.

Due to the high cost of assessment and the work itself, she said they have to select the streets they update completely, not just based on a single issue. Al-Haddad pointed to the work on McKinnon Street as an example. That rebuild is underway.

They have to look for streets that need more than one system update, like not just the water main, but also the sewer line and the road surface. By prioritizing streets that need multiple repairs and upgrades, it allows the borough to get the most for its money when ripping up the road.

Wetor said another issue is getting funding for such a comprehensive project. In some cases, funding for the road and sewer may be approved, but the water isn’t or vice versa.

For the time being, it seems it will be slow going on systemwide repairs, keeping the Public Works team on alert for breaks for the foreseeable future.

“This year we’re doing McKinnon Street,” Wetor said. Last year it was St. Michaels. “We are going to continue to try to chip away at one road a year.”