More than just annoying, this month’s record deep freeze is creating headaches for some homeowners facing interruptions with their water services due to frozen pipes.
That prospect had Woolwich public works employees out in parts of Elmira this week to deliver warnings to properties at higher risk of being frozen out, mostly in the older areas in the town’s north end, including Duke, George, Park and Church streets.
Manager of engineering Richard Sigurdson said by midweek his department had dealt with about 20 frozen water services and/or water meters. He estimated the calls were evenly split between problems on the township’s side of the system and those on the customers’ side.
Some 60 properties were issued with warning notices advising residents to run their water continually in a small stream for the duration of the cold weather. Those properties are in areas where there are historical issues with freezing pipes, said Sigurdson. Most are in Elmira, though the water department has dealt with two properties in St. Jacobs and another in Conestogo.
This year has been exceptionally tough, with some first-time calls from residents experiencing difficulties.
“The frost is getting down deeper than typically we would see,” he explained, noting the township has even had a case where a sanitary lateral froze, though those pipes are usually deeper down than the water services. “It’s a significant issue.”
Given the challenges of last winter and again this year, area municipalities have been sharing information about how to best avoid problems and deal with them when they arise, he added. Longer term, if such extreme cold spells become more commonplace, municipalities might have to look at installing pipes deeper than the two metres used today as a matter of course, though that would come at an extra cost.
“We may need to revisit that standard,” he said.
Unlike some of the other communities, however, Woolwich hasn’t had to deal with any watermain breaks so far this winter.
“Knock on wood. As you know, that’s been a real problem in other municipalities.”
In a related matter, a temporary outage of water services in the Conestogo plains service area on Tuesday was due to a minor electrical issue – “It was very quickly resolved” – not the cold weather.
