City manager: Another main break likely

Staff report

Earlier this month, a water main break left Portales residents without water for more than 24 hours. City Manager Sammy Standefer said another main break is bound to happen again as the city will put 14 miles of new pipeline into the ground over the next few months as part of its new wastewater facility.

“We’re making progress in the town and, unfortunately, this will happen again and it will probably happen with this project,” Standefer said.

“Normally when they hit a line we really doubt that they will have to cut off the entire town. Normally we can isolate to a very small section of town that would lose water for a very small amount of time. Our guys fix leaks every day with very little impact to the community.”

As a result of the main break, Standefer and his staff are now setting up a system where if a break happens again and the town’s water has to be turned off, the word can get out faster.

“If and when we have to make those decisions to cut off the water again, we’re establishing a protocol,” Standefer said. “We’re basically going to set up an incident command; who we need to notify first, schools, the college and the media to get the word out and to keep the public informed. We hope we never have to turn it off again, but we are making the protocol to establish when we do and how that procedure would follow through.”

Standefer said he felt like city officials did a good job letting the public know about the March 10 break and about the workers who stayed up all night to get the pipeline fixed. He also thought work to get water back to the town went smoothly. However, he believes there is always room for improvement and, in the long term, is trying to find a way where the entire city does not have to lose water.

“The biggest thing we’re doing is we’re going back and trying to find valves to try and see if we can cut off a particular line throughout town, and that’s an ongoing project that’ll take years to figure out,” Standefer said.

“What we do know is whenever we have this type of break, where we have to turn off the majority of the town, it’s almost always going to take at least 24 hours to get the water back on, mostly because of the amount of water that we have to drain first.”

The city hopes it can lay the pipeline incident free, but if another break happens or something worse, Standefer wants to make sure his team is ready and that the citizens of Portales are well informed.

“Once we make the call to shut the water down, that’s the stages I want to work on and be more fluid in,” Standefer said. “Getting water to our critical areas such as the nursing homes, making the calls to the vendors to make sure they have bottled water available. We handled all of that, some of it was on the fly, so we’re trying to establish a protocol where once the decision is made we have steps A, B, C and D that we will follow.”