Why some Eastern Kentucky counties are still seeing water problems days after storms
Is that snow melt coming off the mountainside or is it another leak?
That’s the kind of tough distinction that multiple Eastern Kentucky water crews have been forced to make this week.
Crews have been working to fix leaks and restore running water to sprawling stretches of counties that lost service after subzero temperatures swept across the state this past week, snapping water lines and creating headaches for water utilities and their customers throughout Kentucky.
In an urban setting, leaks in the water system are often more obvious, like coming out of the ground in someone’s front yard. But that’s not the reality in Martin County where Craig Miller and Alliance Water Resources manages a long troubled water system.
“It’s not the same as here, because there’s always water running from a mountainside, from a hill or spring,” said Miller, the division manager at Alliance. “So sometimes it takes a more strategic approach when trying to isolate and find leaks, because you have to take it section by section.”
Many rural water systems across the state have suffered from multiple hard-to-detect leaks across hundreds of miles of line that have caused water supplies to drop in storage tanks. As of Thursday, multiple counties had boil water advisories and bottled water was being distributed to residents.
Because of several leaks, some areas supplied by the Evarts Water Plant in Harlan County have had either low water pressure or no water at all at higher elevations.
“Leaks are RARELY found by simply seeing water bubbling up out of the ground,” Woodrow Fields, Evarts’ chief water plant operator, wrote in an email. “Due to the terrain and lots of sandstone and other porous type soils, leaks generally have to be found with specialized leak detecting equipment.”
The water staff in Evarts are doing “all we can do and have been going basically non-stop turning meters off, replacing burst meters and meter bottoms along with fixing leaks on service lines on our side,” Fields wrote.
In Martin County on Wednesday, Miller said crews replaced eight water meters, made nine leak repairs and battled seven leaks in or around customer’s homes. All of those leaks caused the wider system to lose water and each have to be manually found and shut off. The meters in the county all have to be manually read, meaning that staff have to walk up and read the meter.
“All of these things take much, much more time in a system that has low funding (and) is very widespread,” Miller said. “It’s a large system, over 250 miles of waterline throughout an entire county, and you’re walking every single inch of the line looking for leaks.”
Via connected water systems between counties, water can be shared across county lines to fill depleted tanks and raise water pressure. That was the case Thursday in parts of Wolfe County which received water from neighboring Morgan County, Kathi May, the Mayor of Campton, wrote in an update on Facebook.
But if nearby counties are experiencing the same issues then those interconnected systems may not be an option. The City of Hazard, the county seat of Perry County, said as much in their own online update on Thursday.
Destructive and deadly flooding over the summer in Perry and other southeastern counties destroyed multiple water lines. The flooding left the system in a “vulnerable position to freezing,” the City of Hazard said on Facebook.
“City employees as well as contractors are working around the clock to repair leaks,” the city said. “As those are fixed the tanks will start being filled. This will take time due to the amount of lines to fill. The timeframe to complete this is uncertain due to continued breaks as the pressure is restored to the system.”
In many rural settings, there’s simply not many water employees working to service a large coverage area. Since last Friday, Miller estimated that many Martin County water employees had worked close to 90 hours. He also estimated that his staff is young, some just a couple years out of high school, and currently receiving some difficult on-the-job training.
“I mean, they’re just working nonstop,” Miller said, adding that the crews are working to put more than just band-aids on the leaks.
Several utility services are asking for patience from customers who are understandably upset after lacking water for days in some places.
“That’s a normal reaction,” Miller said. “Everybody is upset when they don’t have power. Everybody’s upset when they don’t have water. I am too and I work in the business, right? You just have to be patient and understand that people are working diligently to correct the issues.”
This story was originally published December 30, 2022 at 10:17 AM.