Rosser Avenue watermain repairs to last 2 more weeks

Emergency water-valve replacement along Rosser Avenue and Ninth Street in Brandon will continue until the end of the month, keeping some road lanes downtown closed in the meantime.

The lane closures will be “off and on” until work wraps up around Oct. 31, the city’s general manager of operations, Todd Burton, said Thursday.

The replacement became necessary after city crews tried to turn off water for a building on a block of Ninth Street, but “the belt did not isolate.” Workers then tried to isolate valves on either side, but that also didn’t work. In total, five valves are in need of replacement.

Burton said the adjacent valves “were working or appear to be working,” but the city was “starting to get into an area now where it would cause us to shut off like six to 10 city blocks downtown as we’re backing up farther and farther, and at that point in time, it wasn’t acceptable.”

The city decided to hire a company to do the repairs while water stays on, instead of turning off the water for part of the neighbourhood, potentially affecting a large number of customers.

“We’ve never had anything like this (happen before) and never had to bring in someone to do this before,” Burton said.

Only one company across the country is authorized to do those repairs, he said. They will start work on Monday and hopefully repair one valve per day.

Then the city will remove old valves and cap them, and repair the roads themselves, either doing a long-term patch or a short-term one, depending on the weather.

“Because it’s a major road, we want to do the best we can to get it through the winter,” Burton said. “Either way, we’ll probably have to come back next spring and adjust the patch.”

The city plans to test other valves potentially in need of repair along Rosser Avenue to see if they also need to be fixed.

The affected stretch involves a 10-inch-wide main line installed in 1992 on Rosser Avenue, extending from about Sixth Street to 13th Street. The first valve tested on Ninth Street is connected to the main line with a smaller six-inch-wide pipe.

“Once the dust settles on this, we will start to put plans in place to test those valves and make sure we have the necessary parts to repair if needed,” Burton said.

Those tests will happen next year.

“We’ll have a debrief in a month or so on what’s our best plan of attack for next summer, for how we start testing these and put in maintenance plans,” Burton said.

He said there isn’t an estimated cost for the last-second fix at this point, as the city didn’t plan for the emergency repair.

Water should flow normally while next week’s repairs take place.

“Normally when we’ve had trouble with one or two valves, we just deal with it on a case-by-case basis,” Burton said. “But coming out of this, we’ll do like a lessons learned. And what do we need to change going forward.”

» alambert@brandonsun.com