Repairing huge leaks saves thousands of dollars: Issues with Gainesville’s aging water system keep city employees busy making repairs, improvements

The city of Gainesville’s water system is a major part of the municipality’s work. City water specialist Jessi Price recently gave the Times an update on the condition of the water system, including issues that have arisen from aging pipes and infrastructure and several improvements the city has made over the last year or so. 

Repairing east-side leak lowers loss to 0, saves thousands each month

Price said the city’s aging water system was built through the years with inexpensive materials as city officials in the past tried to do the best job they could, often with a very limited budget. The result has been an uphill battle in finding and fighting water loss across the center, east and west wards, with each ward operating its own city well. 

Great progress has been made on the east side of the city, Price says, reducing the water loss from more than an 80 percent loss in October 2018 to a 0 percent loss now. 

“In October 2018, we had an 82 percent water loss on the east side. It had been around 60 percent before that but jumped the 20-plus percent that month. That’s when I got Missouri Rural Water Association (MRWA) down here, and we went looking for leaks,” Price said, explaining that MRWA is a nonprofit state organization that provides free aid to municipalities that pay a once-a-year membership fee. 

The crew found one leak on the east side that was repaired in October, and it located a second large leak in March that was fixed. 

“The first one ended up saving $1,000 [a month] on the city’s electric bill alone, and the second one saved another $500. So by fixing the two leaks, we’ve saved the city $1,500 in electric [monthly bills],” Price said. “Add on top of that the savings from not pumping and chlorinating the [leaked] water and the extra work on the water pumps [to pump the leaked water]. It was a big deal.”

Price said they estimated the east-side leak repair cost the city around $300 to $400 for parts and labor.

“We’ve been really working hard on the east side, and we’ve gotten it down to zero now,” she said. “The other ones aren’t so great.”

Center ward water loss at 47 percent, complicated by paved-over water valves

The city’s center ward has been losing about 63 percent of the water it’s pumped there since January this year. Recently, Price and the city maintenance duo, Mike Davis and Josh Easterday, have gotten the loss down to 47 percent, and they’re still working to lower it from there, she said. 

“The center area is harder to find leaks because of the covered-up valves,” Price said. “It takes us longer to find where the valves are and to isolate different areas in order to listen for the leaks.” 

Price explained that at some point before the current city employees were working there, the city repaved the streets, asphalting over the manholes and water valves. 

She said the water lines are supposed to have water valves installed in certain increments along the line that help with leak detection, as well as an emergency shutoff area so that section can be bypassed. City employees are currently working to find and make the valves more accessible. 

“That’s something we’re working on. We haven’t found them all yet. So if we need to find one, we have to go out there with a metal detector and use it to try to detect the valve under the asphalt,” she said.

After the valve is located with the metal detector, the maintenance employees have to use a jackhammer to remove the asphalt covering it so they can access it. After they’ve accessed the valve, they raise the valve topper to current street level so it’s easier to access if needed in the future. 

One larger leak in the Ballpark Road area was recently repaired, and Price says she anticipates that next month’s water loss in the center ward will reflect that. 

The center well covers a large area, including the center of Gainesville, Ballpark Road and the south side of Highway 160 where the Bullseye/Subway and White River Valley Electric Cooperative businesses sit. With a large area of land that’s compacted with lots of infrastructure, it makes it difficult to pinpoint leaks, Price says. 

“This area is the oldest and most congested in the city, with so many residences, sewer lines, sidewalks and streets. So it’s harder,” she said. “We do our best not to dig up sidewalks and streets unless we know exactly where the leak is or the water has come to the surface in that area.”

West-side water loss at 66 percent totals one million gallons of water a month 

The city’s west side had been losing around 83 percent of the water in its lines earlier this year, and recent repairs have decreased that loss to 66 percent. 

Price says the west side currently has a long-time leak that is currently hemorrhaging 50,000 gallons of water a day, which equates to more than a million gallons of water a month. The leak is somewhere in the water line that runs from near St. William’s Catholic Church on the hill west of town to the end of the parking lot near Dollar General and Eddie’s Tackle Box. City officials never see the water, so they assume it is eventually making its way to Lick Creek somewhere. 

“When MoDOT put in the newer westbound route of Highway 160, they raised the road up significantly,” Price said, explaining that the area used to be level with what is now the Dollar General and Bullseye parking lots on either side of the highway. “Well, when they raised the road up, they didn’t raise the water line. That means [the water line is] currently 15 to 17 feet deep. We can’t fix that. We can’t even dig that deep.”

Price said the city identified one leak in the Dollar General parking lot that workers attempted to repair, but once the city employees began the work, they realized it was beyond their equipment’s ability. 

The city has a pressure reducer installed near St. William’s that helps slow the water coming down the hill, but Price says that even with the reducer, the water is highly pressurized in that section of pipe. 

“That’s harder on the lines to have the high pressure. We’ve also found that [in the past when the water line was installed] they didn’t use glue at the joints on a lot of the pipe, and they didn’t bed it when it was put in. So it was bound to leak,” she said. “Like a lot of small towns, things were done as inexpensively as possible. One area that we fixed had 1-inch pipe. The only problem is that it wasn’t actually 1 inch. So none of the fittings would fit the existing pipe. We had to dig all the way up to the water meter and replace that whole section. So a job that would have taken two to three hours took all day long. It’s frustrations like that that pop up all the time. But it is what it is. All you can do is try to make it better for the future,” Price said.

The city council gave city employees permission to hire an engineer for the Highway 160 water leak. The council plans to accept bids for an outside company to come in and replace the current line. The new water line will lie 48 inches below the surface, making it much easier to access than the current 15-foot-deep pipe. 

Water improvements made, new booster pumps installed

In between fixing water leaks and working to lower the water loss across the three wards, city employees have also been working to update, replace and repair other elements of the water system. 

One repair that became imminent last fall was replacement of the water booster pumps on the east side of the city.

“The way the city is laid out is kind of like wings on a central circle. We have the center of town, then east and west wings out in either direction,” Price said. “We need a backup plan in case the east well goes down, which could happen with a lightning strike, tornado or anything else that could take out the well, so people don’t have to go without water during the time it takes us to get the issue fixed.”

The solution is water booster pumps that open up the water well from the center ward and pump it into the east ward, allowing all residents to continue to have running water even if the east well is not working. The city had installed two booster pumps on Cedar Oak Drive many years ago on the east side for just that situation; however, Price said, the equipment hadn’t been maintained over the years. 

Then the city’s east well went down in September 2020, just a few days before Gainesville Schools were set to open. 

“We tried and tried to get [the booster pumps] to work, but they just wouldn’t go. They were seized up. They were done,” Price said, explaining that the city doesn’t have a lot of records from before the last decade or so, meaning city employees don’t know how old the booster pumps were. The city quickly tried to get the word out to east side residents to conserve water, but no one could repair the well issue for four or five days. 

The school closed, and several residents had to rely on bottled water to get by until the east-side well was operational again. That’s when the city knew something had to be done. 

Soon after, the city council voted to have two new booster pumps installed, and it hired someone to construct an easy-access topper over the booster pumps, which replaced the former difficult-to-access cover. 

Fire hydrants 

There are just under 100 fire hydrants within the Gainesville city limits, and officials have been looking at repairing and replacing some of them.

“It’s something the council OK’d in the budget last year, but we haven’t been able to spend any money for the fire hydrants yet. We have a lot of them in the city, and they need attention,” Price said. “The problem is a new hydrant is $2,500, and you need four guys to put them together.”

Price said to purchase the hydrants and have them installed, the quote is closer to $4,500 each.

Price said they’ve looked at updating and repairing the existing hydrants, but the city hasn’t been able to find a company that works on them that’s willing to travel to Gainesville.

Pressure reducers and water meters

Price said the city is an oddity among municipalities because Gainesville’s water system has unusually high pressure, requiring pressure reducers. 

“You get the amount of pressure based on how high your towers are and how full you have them. Ours are never full because we already have too much pressure. If we didn’t reduce it, it’d blow the pipes apart,” she said.

The city recently fixed a leaky pressure reducer near St. William’s Church on MM Highway (old Highway 160 west of the Gainesville business district). The reducer is not easy to access; the work requires an excavator. The city hopes to install an above-ground, easy-to-access control panel for the reducer in the future. 

The city has also recently purchased about half the supplies needed to replace the water meters in town. Price said she thinks they’ve purchased around 250 new meters and installed about half of them. The city got a discounted rate on the meters it purchased because the wholesaler had an order from a large subdivision contractor that was never picked up. Price said the city was able to purchase the normally $250 water meters for $75, saving about $43,750 on the 250 it purchased. 

“We have over 90 percent of the meters on the west side replaced, including all of the residential ones. We’re just waiting to put in the larger meters for businesses. This requires digging up the service, and some of them are very deep,” she said. “The east side has about one-fourth of the residential meters changed out, and the center ward will be the next area to start on.”

Changing out meters has made a large impact on the city’s water loss as well, Price said. The Department of Natural Resources recommends that municipalities change out meters every 10 years for efficiency. The majority of Gainesville’s meters are more than 13 years old, and the newer ones that were bought to replace them in 2010 aren’t holding up well. 

“Over time, meters slow down due to build-up and moving parts. The new meters that the city has purchased don’t have moving parts and are warrantied for 10 years of service,” Price said.

Replacing chlorination pumps

Price and City Clerk Lisa Goodnight say they’ve heard many comments about how much better tasting and smelling the city water is now than it was a few years ago. The change? The installation of a chlorination pump. 

“We used to mix our water and chlorine  before pumping it into the water supply. When you combine the two, it activates the chlorine and makes the water more corrosive. It’s just like pouring bleach onto clothes . . . how it eats through it. So it was killing our pumps,” Price said. 

The water pumps cost around $400 a piece, and Price said the city had to replace the pumps two or three times a year before the switch. 

The technique of mixing the chlorine and water before pumping was used for decades because in the 1980s, when the city was deciding on a way to chlorinate the water, there were no chlorination pumps small enough to service a town Gainesville’s size. The city decided to pre-mix the chlorine and water at that time, and it continued that process until two years ago.

“In December 2019, we switched to a system that pumps chlorine into the water supply directly. Now we have storage tanks that only hold chlorine without any water to activate it, so it lasts a lot longer. The system pumps the chlorine up into the water supply,” she said. 

Since installing the new system, the city hasn’t had to replace a pump. 

See next week’s Times for an article on the city’s sewer, streets and other elements.