Gyro Park may have resembled an outdoor skating rink over the weekend, but it wasn’t because the city was attempting to add a new ice surface.
The park froze over after water flooded out through a water main break on Lakeside Drive. With the ground frozen with a thick layer of frost, the water found its easiest path under the road and into the park where it could more easily escape.
“It just started bubbling up through the park there,” said Len Robson, manager of public works.
The relentless stretch of cold weather is doing more than just making everyone bundle up; it’s also the cause of a spate of waterline breaks.
While city crews were attending the Lakeshore Drive break, another occurred on Okanagan Avenue.
“It was a little bit busy for a while,” said Robson, explaining that breaks aren’t uncommon in the winter.
“The ground hardens up, freezes up, there’s slight movements in there, pipes contract and then things fail,” said Robson. “When you add on top of that the aging infrastructure you end up with vulnerable pieces where there is corrosion or whatever, failing.”
Robson stresses that cold weather is the main culprit, adding that there has been more breaks this cold season than in previous years.
“We’ve had about 10 in about three weeks. So it’s been pretty darn busy,” said Robson. “In my opinion mostly based on weather at this point. We have about two to three feet of frost in the ground.”
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The water mains pipes are much lower in the ground than that, Robson said, but the frost causes the soil around them to shift.
“We get it when the frost comes in and we also get it when the frost comes out typically because things start moving again,” said Robson. “I do expect when this starts coming out of the ground, we’re going to have a similar type of challenges.”
Working to repair the pipes in the cold, with flooded ground, is not the best of working conditions, but Robson said the crews are up for it.
“This is what they do,” said Robson. “It’s the exciting part of the job. They know they’re depended on. They’re down there in lousy conditions doing what they got to do.
“I wouldn’t say that they love being called out at two o’clock in the morning but they certainly step up every time.”
The break on Lakeside required special treatment. Turning off the water to fix the break would have only cut water supply to one property, but that would have been the Lakeside Resort, with multiple restaurants, rooms and guests all requiring water.
“We didn’t want to turn them off to fix it. We wanted to try to figure out how we could provide temporary water to them,” said Robson, adding that the foreman came up with the idea of connecting a fire hydrant at the bottom of Main Street to one on the resort property to feed their system.
“We could shut down the (water) main and do the repair without the Lakeside even really being affected,” said Robson. “It was a great solution to a challenging problem.”
