SILVERDALE — A quick response and great teamwork between Silverdale Water District and contractors Caseco, Inc., fixed what could have been a catastrophic break in less than 12 hours on Nov. 18.

Early that morning on Cascade Street, the water main below the road suffered perhaps the worst radial crack, including a 10-by-8-inch hole, in the last decade for SWD, resulting in 600,000 gallons of water being lost and about $100,000 worth of road damage.

“At 4:11 in the morning, I got a call from CENCOM … that they had CKF&R (Central Kitsap Fire &Rescue) out on Cascade Street … and that they were shutting down the road due to the fact that the road was compromised and there was a water main break,” said Sid Williams, SWD operations.

Williams said CKF&R responded to the 911 call from a resident who, when she got up to use the restroom in the middle of the night, heard the “roar” of the water from her house off the street.

When CKF&R responded, the tires of their truck fell through the road.

“That’s probably why they shut down the road,” Williams said. “They went ahead and evacuated the two houses that were right at the site.”

What happened, Williams said, was unavoidable.

“It had a radial crack,” he said, “which is a crack made as the ground settles over time. As stuff (such as wood or other organic materials) decays in the ground, there’s pockets and voids, and as cars drive over, just general settling happens. It creates pockets where there’s differential and it creates a kind of pressure in spots.

“Generally, it’s just a radial crack around the whole thing and we can go in and put a repair clamp on it. In this case, what it did is it cracked, and then on one side of the crack, it blew out the side of the main.”

Williams said he was on site by 4:40 a.m. He said they “throttled the main” (controlled the flow, while still allowing positive pressure so nothing goes back inside the main) by 5:25 a.m. Other SWD employees, including general manager Morgan Johnson, were on site by 6:30 a.m.

Johnson decided they needed to call in a contractor to help fix the problem, and Caseco, Inc., “responded within five minutes,” Williams said.

“The water main was repaired by noon. We flushed it and got it back in service by 1 p.m. Then the temporary road repair was done by 3:30 p.m.,” Williams said.

“It all went really quick,” he added. “It could have been a lot worse.”

Williams said the location of the break was almost perfect to avoid worse damage: the overflowing water ended up going right between two houses at the site of the break. The water did flow under the road for about 160 feet, but where it broke out, it flowed into a gully and avoided doing much damage to the houses around there.

“There was so much water,” Williams said, “it kind of stayed under the road and followed the road bed down and washed it (out). It destroyed the road, it created a sinkhole right at the break, as well as 160 feet down the road.”

The worst damage was done to the road itself. The district and contractor ended up tearing up about 200 feet of roadway. During repairs, Williams said a back hoe fell through the road much like the CKF&R truck had earlier.

In all, 600,000 gallons of water were lost, pulling from five different reservoirs. The district does have emergency alarms in place for high usage, but due to the hydraulic system, the water was coming from multiple sources, meaning nothing was so affected as to set off alarms. However, one large reservoir did end up losing about 50 percent of its water (normal usage from that reservoir is 10-15 percent, Williams said).

“We had a lot of reservoirs affected by this break,” Williams said. “It’s a lot of water we lost, but that’s where the system’s nice.

“There were 12 houses affected that were out of water. If it had been a different system design … (people would have) lost the ability to have water on a wider scale. Where it happened, everything kind of worked out to our benefit, I think, and our customer’s benefit.”

Had this been a normal radial crack, without the added damage of a blown out side, Eric Pickard, SWD maintenance, estimates they would have lost a couple hundred gallons of water per minute. Instead, he estimated they lost between 2,500 and 3,000 gallons a minute.

“On this street, the pipe was in good shape,” Pickard said. “It was a settling issue. The pipe wasn’t bad, it was still strong and durable. It had just given up with so much side pressure.”

Pickard said that in downtown Silverdale areas, most of that type of water main pipe has been replaced over the last 20 years to eliminate these kinds of problems, but said that while residential water mains will be replaced eventually, it’s not something the district is in a rush to do.

“Of the little (radial) breaks, we get less than one a year,” Pickard said. “This was the biggest in probably 10 years.”

Now, the pipe is fixed and the road has been temporarily repaired. Pickard said they have to wait to permanently fix the road until spring, to ensure the ground has settled completely. Overall, the cost of fixing the road is estimated at $100,000; insurance adjusters are still working with homeowners to figure out the amount of damage done to the residential properties.

“We’ll continue to help the homeowners with the adjuster and get all the homeowner stuff taken care of immediately,” Pickard said. “Then the next step is deal with the road in springtime.”

Williams added that the district will do extensive testing of the water in the area to make sure “the health of the water and chlorine residuals” remain the same as before the break.

“Sid’s response was very timely,” said Pickard. “The contractor getting there as he did kind of saved us. Otherwise, that road would have been closed Thanksgiving weekend. So them responding like they did and throwing all their people at it with ours made it a much more tenable situation to deal with.

“We were able to put it all back together and people were able to drive through there in 12 hours, which is very good for something that size. A lot of that, I would give credit to Caseco for helping. They did a lot of the work.”

Michelle Beahm is a reporter for the Central Kitsap Reporter and Bremerton Patriot. She can be reached at mbeahm@soundpublishing.com.

A blown out water main caused significant damage to Cascade Street on Nov. 18. Sid Williams / Silverdale Water District

A water main break on Nov. 18 resulted in about 600,000 gallons of water being lost from various Silverdale Water District reservoirs. The water washed out the road bed at the site of the break, causing two sink holes within 200 feet of each other. Sid Williams / Silverdale Water District

Due to the quick work of Silverdale Water District and Caseco, Inc., Cascade Street was reopened to traffic within 12 hours of being alerted to a major water main break that caused significant damage to the road. Sid Williams / Silverdale Water District