Million-Gallon Water Main Leak is Fixed

In the middle of  Monday's Macungie Borough Council meeting, during the borough manager's report, somewhere between the CIPPL and generator updates, Manager Chris Boehm mentioned that the "missing water" had been found.

Though she said nothing more about it during the meeting, afterward she said that about 1 million gallons was unaccounted for in the monthly water report.

"All I could think of is 'where's the sink hole,' " Boehm said. But there is no sink hole and there won't be one—not one due to this leak, anyway.

Longtime residents will remember an enormous sinkhole that occurred on West Chestnut Street in 1986. But that area was built on a landfill, according to Doug McNair, Macungie's waterworks operator.

What they found last month, Boehm said later, was a crack in the borough water main had occurred somewhere near the Tyler Pipe property very close to Swabia Creek.

The ground, which is normally wet this time of year, absorbed some of the water, McNair said.

The rest went into the creek, Boehm said.

McNair monitors the water that comes from the two wells that bring water to Macungie residents. Once a month he studies the numbers to make sure everything is flowing properly. He could tell that between sometime in January and the end of February more than 1 million gallons had gone somewhere it wasn't supposed to.

The borough brought in David Bonkovich, a water systems consultant from Kempton, who found a leak in the borough's water main through electronic testing.

"It wasn't a burst pipe. It was a slow leak," McNair said.

Members of the borough's Public Works Department dug around the pipe, clamped it and now the monitoring system McNair uses tells him that the repair is working just fine.

McNair is not required to report leaks immediately unless there is an influx of contaminants, which was not the case here.

He will, however, include information about the leak in his annual report to the Delaware River Basin Commission which regulates the river system in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York. His most recent report—for 2012—was due at the beginning of March, according to the DRBC's Kate Schmidt.

And though 1 million gallons sounds like a lot of water—and it is—the recent leak fell far short of a major event, she said.

"We’d rate it around a 2-3 on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the worst," she said in an emailed comment.

"A leak of this size in the winter months is not that unusual for a system of their size, but, obviously, it’s not supposed to happen with good maintenance, etc. Older pipes, under pressure, buried in the ground can leak, and do; it’s all a question of how much," Schmidt said.

The cost of the clamp was about $350, McNair said, and the cost of the missing water at $1.34 per 1,000 gallons was around $1,340, Boehm said.