Syracuse, N.Y. — Water may not flow through a huge underground water main in Cicero that ruptured in December until mid-January, officials said today.
Work crews are expected to finish laying the new 134-foot section of pipe on Jan. 16, said Jeff Brown, executive director of the Onondaga County Water Authority. After that, the agency must pressurize the pipes and test the water to Health Department specifications, he said.
“It’s unclear how long that process would take,” Brown said. “It could be days.
This means residents and businesses may need to continue protective measures until the third week of January. That would be more than four weeks since the line was shut down on December 20. Officials said at the time that the repair would take two weeks, but weather and delays in getting equipment and crews have pushed back the timeline.
The good news is that water levels in reservoirs serving residents and businesses affected by the line break are rising. The two reservoirs in Manlius have risen from 20% to about 24% capacity, Onondaga County Executive Ryan McMahon said at a news conference today. The tanks have a combined capacity of 50 million gallons.
“We were actually able to increase the stock because of the protection and efforts of all of our partners and the team at OCWA,” McMahon said. “What could have been a crisis now appears to be a controlled process.”
The county distributed about 3,400 cases of water at Fayetteville-Manlius High School today.
A 42-inch-diameter transmission line in Cicero completely failed on Dec. 20 after several attempts by OCWA over the previous month to repair it. While work to replace the pipes continues, residents of the six towns are being asked to continue to conserve water to reduce demand.
The towns are DeWitt, Manlius, Pompey, Sullivan, Lenox and Lincoln.
The 27,000 industrial, commercial and residential customers in those cities typically use about 5 million gallons a day this time of year, but have reduced their usage to about 3.5 million gallons. This is the amount that OCWA was able to deliver to the reservoirs each day by connecting to other water systems and making changes to the OCWA system.
Work on the site continued over the holidays, Brown said. By the end of today, he said, the first major stage of the repair should be done, when workers drive the final 40-foot sheet into the ground. These sheets essentially form an underground bath around the broken section of pipe so crews can pump out the groundwater.
OCWA has been dealing with water leaks in the same area since at least the summer when a main transmission line valve leaked. This was fixed in August; in November, the first leak in the main line was found 30 feet from the valve repair. Brown said the two are not related.
The agency fixed that November leak, but a nearby main pipe sprung two more leaks in December. Temporary fixes failed, and on December 20, OCWA disconnected the pipeline.
The cities of Syracuse and Oneida each provide 800,000 gallons per day, and OCWA installed temporary pumps in Otisco Lake.
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