Inspecting the system of thousands of valves that control the flow of drinking water through Atlanta’s underground pipes will be a “huge undertaking” after years of neglect, the head of the Department of Watershed Management told members of City Council on Tuesday.
Days after an Atlanta Journal-Constitution investigation revealed the city’s valve testing program had been lacking for years, Commissioner Al Wiggins Jr. indicated his department was still grappling with how to ensure its shut-off valves will work in a moment of crisis.
When a major supply line broke in Midtown in May, several valves failed, and a geyser sprayed water for days in the heart of the city, prolonging a disruptive and embarrassing episode. The AJC’s investigation found the department had been testing too infrequently to detect the faulty valves and did not consistently document its work, leaving officials in the dark about the true state of the system.
Wiggins told the City Utilities Committee his department doesn’t know how frequently crews were testing the valves because of sloppy and incomplete record-keeping on paper logs, and the system crews use to find valves is “not 100% accurate.”
In the months since the water main breaks, the department discovered that “quite a few” valves were incorrectly logged as open or closed, Wiggins said. And he said the agency wasn’t even sure how frequently the valves need to be tested because it first needs to assess what condition they’re in.
“It’s unfortunate that we’re here, but we have a solid plan. And my plan is to build a process that’s not dependent on a person or a position. It’s based on a solid asset management program that’s incorporated into a software program,” Wiggins said in response to questioning by Councilman Howard Shook, the utilities committee’s longest-serving member.
“Well, maybe the best time to have had that would have been 20 years ago, which just means the second-best time is today,” Shook responded.
Shook’s questioning came on the heels of the AJC’s investigation into why the Midtown water main break, which upended one of America’s business districts and forced thousands of customers to boil their water for nearly a week, took so long to fix.
The AJC’s investigation found that valves froze up or wouldn’t stay closed when crews tried to stop the Midtown geyser. The city’s existing records indicate they hadn’t been tested in several years, but officials said the record-keeping problems were so severe they couldn’t say for certain when they’d last been checked.
Already, Wiggins said, the department has begun inspecting valves in areas with low water pressure and near sensitive facilities like hospitals and senior homes. And he said the department is switching to software that will automatically schedule valve tests and allow crews to send in reports from the field.
But he said that to assess the state of every valve in Atlanta’s system will be a big undertaking because there are some 66,000 valves to check. The department is already struggling with a high rate of unfilled job openings, Wiggins said, and will need help from outside contractors to complete testing on all the valves.
“We just don’t have the capacity, and it’s not the best use of our time for our teams to inspect 270 valves a day if we’re trying to get this done in a year’s time frame,” Wiggins told the utilities committee.
The department will begin taking bids for that work before the end of the year, Wiggins said.
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