With cold temperatures and little snow cover, some Grand Marais residents have experienced frozen water lines between the city water main and their homes. At the January 11, 2010 meeting of the Public Utilities Commission (PUC), Billing Clerk Jan Smith said the city had received five calls regarding frozen water lines in the previous two weeks.
” Thecity is usually the first to notice when a water line freezes, City Administrator Mike Roth said, because it can cause a water meter to break. Sometimes the problem happens when residents are out of town and their furnace fails. Smith remembers numerous times this has happened. “They didn’t have a clue,” she said, “until we called and said, ‘Guess what?’”
“A lot of homes have been freezing up,” said Water/Wastewater Superintendent Tom Nelson, “so we’ve been running around turning water on and off [and] fixing meters.” A lot of the homes city workers have dealt with have had the same problem before.
Nelson asked PUC commissioners Tim Kennedy and Hal Greenwood if they thought the city should start charging for service calls. Greenwood said he thinks it should. Kennedy agreed, as long as the problem is with the property owner’s pipes or equipment.
Nelson told the PUC he would bring spreadsheets to the next meeting that show costs related to maintaining water lines.
In a later conversation, Roth said the city is usually able to get a hold of residents whose water lines have frozen while they were out of town, but leaving a phone number with the city is a good idea for people going away for an extended period of time.
North Shore Hospital also had a line break recently, Nelson reported, with 80-100,000 gallons of water leaking out within a few hours. Because the line leaked so much that replacing it would have required evacuating the hospital, it was simply turned off and abandoned.
Fortunately, new water lines on both the hospital end and the city end had been installed during roadwork on the Old Gunflint Trail and County Road 7.
Nelson said new water lines underneath the boulevards along city streets are better than the old lines underneath the streets. Thenew pipes, made of ductile iron, which is more flexible and fairly strong according to Roth, are superior to the old pipes made of cast steel or cast iron.
Agreement to lease pole space
The city is finalizing an agreement allowing Qwest to continue leasing equipment space on city electric poles. Qwest has had attachments on city lines since the 1970s, Roth said, but the contract language has not been updated since then. Qwest will pay $15 per pole each year.
Line Superintendent Mike Taylor said the lease would pay Qwest’s fair share for things like tree trimming, maintenance of rights of way, and replacing rotten poles.
Roth said the contract with Qwest could be used as a model agreement that could also be used with Mediacom and the county, which will soon be connecting its public buildings with fiber optic cable.
Taylor said the city crew has been clearing areas for future fiber optic cable installation in anticipation of a countywide fiber optic network that has been authorized to use the new 1% sales and use tax starting in April.
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