- Provo's Center Street reopened after a corroded pipe caused a water geyser.
- The 30-year-old pipe broke due to unexpected corrosion, affecting cars and businesses.
- Provo officials are monitoring nearby pipes to ensure no further corrosion has occurred.
PROVO — Just days after a "geyser" erupted in the middle of downtown Provo, the road has been reopened and public works officials are monitoring nearby pipes to ensure no further breaks occur.
Around 2:30 p.m. Saturday, water started spewing out of a 4-inch hole on the side of a 6-inch ductile iron pipe underneath Center Street near the Freedom Boulevard intersection.
Public Works Director Gordon Haight said the pipe had corroded and, due to pressure building in the pipe, "it broke catastrophically."
"Most leaks, generally, you have a small hole and it bubbles up a little bit of water and it's not this thrilling. This one, the integrity of the pipe was lost and we saw the geyser," he said.
Gallons of water were shooting into the air, creating Provo's limited-time geyser. Haight said the amount of water lost isn't a concern, though.
"It does look like a lot, but it's actually fairly insignificant to the amount of water the city goes through each day. ... We don't want to just throw water out on the asphalt, but it's not much in the scheme of how much water we go through in a day," Haight said.
About 15 cars and several businesses were damaged by rocks that flew up out of the 8-foot wide sinkhole that opened up around the gushing water. Public works officials arrived at the scene after police had shut down the road and started working on repairs.
Water was shut off for several hours for businesses along the block, but service was restored Saturday evening after the pipe had been replaced. By Tuesday morning, the road had been repaired and was reopened for traffic.
This pipe was an unusual one to break, as it's only 30 years old, whereas most pipes have a lifespan of 60 years, Haight said.
"We have much older ones that were in better shape than this. It caught us off guard that this pipe had this much corrosion and had deteriorated so much. We're paying more attention and watching this pipe. We are replacing pipes every year throughout the city that we know are much older and have much more propensity for leaking," he said.
The technology in the industry has drastically improved in the last few decades, Haight said. Now, industry standards include "a whole slew of things" that increase the lifespan of pipes, such as plastic wrap around the ductile iron pipes to prevent corrosion in certain soils and proper bedding techniques.
"This was put in 30 years ago under technology 30 years ago. Today, we have much better technology and are more aware of corrosive soils," he said.
The city is inspecting pipes in the downtown area more closely as they were all installed at the same time to ensure others have not lost their structural integrity. While there are routine checks of all pipes in the city, the public works department wants to ensure there isn't any other degradation in the pipe system near where the break occurred.
"We want to make sure we protect our residents and make sure they aren't in harm's way of broken pipe," Haight said. "We are very conscientious of what happened. We want the public to know that we do everything we can to make sure these kinds of catastrophic failures don't take place."
He commended the public works team for jumping onto the issue and fixing the pipe so quickly.
Provo has been looking into funding solutions for addressing aging water infrastructure over the last year, including a recent proposal to increase water rates. Part of the proposal would switch the seasonal rate system to a tiered system in order to follow new legislation passed this year.
After some tense meetings where residents, the mayor and the City Council disagreed on the best way to move forward with the water rates, the issue was continued in late April. Mayor Michelle Kaufusi offered a plan in May with the rate increase cut in half by utilizing outside funding, but the matter is still up in the air as the council has not set a date yet for a vote.
