City of Crookston Public Works Director Pat Kelly said the city staff noticed a significant water usage increase over a couple of days before locating a leak on N. Front street Tuesday night. “We’ve noticed an increased use of water for the last day or two,” said Kelly. “Our water department and wastewater department have been hunting, checking manholes to find it. They found it [Tuesday] night and it was a pretty significant leak losing somewhere in the vicinity of a half million gallons of water a day. We’ve got the street closed off for a while to televise the sanitary sewer because that’s where the water was getting in.”
The leak has been repaired, but the City still needs to check the stability of the sanitary sewer the water was getting into as well as do work to limit the potential for damage to the road. “We’ve got that repaired but there was some tunneling underneath [the road],” said Kelly. “First we need to make sure the sanitary is structurally sound. Then to probably minimize the damage to the roadway and potential failure we’ll probably be pumping in a flowable fill which is a light mix concrete to stabilize the roadway.”
The section located just south of W 7th St will probably be closed until early next week. “Once we get the report and it’s okay to put the flowable fill we’ll give it a day or two to cure before we open the road up,” said Kelly. “In the meantime, we’ll get it graveled and that too. So it might be until Monday or early next week before we can open the road there.”
