City takes proactive approach to main break

BALTIMORE - There is only so much that you can say about a hole in the ground.

It's a big hole and now it has a lot of smaller ones.

Just the first steps to rebuild the streetscape here on Light Street.

There's a lot of digging still to do.

The bad 20 inch water line is at least four feet down and seven hundred feet of it has to go, along with tons of concrete asphalt and dirt and three weeks of work.

But that's just one line a smaller ten inch diameter line is also getting replaced.

To understand why the light street work is going to take three weeks, you need to start all the way on the other side of town.

Late last week the city started work on a 54 inch water line, one of the biggest that takes water to two other counties.

The reason why they tore out this section of pipe is because special sensing equipment told them it was going to fail.

Being proactive is the word here.

"The city we are now deploying asset management approach to all of our underground pipeline systems so we can the very prioritized fashion lay out plans to systematically replace the pipes that need to be replaced taking the most vulnerable ones first." City Public Works Department Bureau Chief Rudolph Chow says.

And there is not just one vulnerable pipe on Light Street.  

There are two.

About 700 feet of 10 inch pipe laid here in 1914 was nearing the end of its expected life.

And the city says the best way to manage that asset is to take it out as well.

And with monitoring and planning they can hope the two new lines will last another 100 years or more.

“Three weeks is a long time from the motorist’s perspective but for a system improvement perspective and reliability this work needs to be done hoping people will be patient and once it's done we'll have a more reliable system for delivering water."

The repairs are expected to take three weeks.