
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, January 14, 1995                   TAG: 9501170041
SECTION: CURRENT                    PAGE: NRV-7   EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY 
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: PULASKI                                 LENGTH: Medium

HIGH-TECH SEWER LEAK FINDERS HELPING PULASKI SAVE MONEY

Technology is helping the town of Pulaski track down sewer line leaks that have been eating away at its budget for years.

Members of Town Council's Utilities Committee got a look Thursday morning at a videotape showing some of the worst underground leaks found so far, from inside the sewer lines.

They were taped using a mobile video camera purchased by the town last year, when the leaks became so bad that the Peppers Ferry authority, which supplies water to Pulaski for sewage line flow, told the town it had to reduce the amount of water it was using.

Town employees have surveyed about three miles of the town's 60 miles of lines during the past three months. Town Engineer John Hawley estimated that the sections with major leaks totaled less than 1,000 feet, but the town would not have known where those leaks were without the camera.

``I think you can see the value of the investment that Town Council has made here,'' Town Manager Tom Combiths said. The total investment, including a van for the mobile camera, was about $75,000.

A single break revealed on the video saw five gallons of water per minute coming into the line. Hawley said the cost of treating that extra inflow amounted to more than $2,000 a year.

And that was just one of the breaks found by chief camera operator Terry Nester and town crews.

Hawley said the town has already corrected leaks that had wasted about 800,000 gallons of water a day.

``The easy ones are gone,'' he said. Others are more like the broken 8-inch clay pipe on Franklin Avenue that lies under a 30-inch concrete drain pipe, or the 16.5-foot deep manhole near Magnox Corp. where an estimated 25 gallons of water a minute are being wasted.

Some lines are near a state of complete collapse. ``The one on Franklin, where you have breaks every 10 feet, you just go in and replace the whole line,'' Hawley said.

The committee also heard a report from Public Works Director Mike Jenkins on maintenance work for the town's water storage tanks, which involves draining the tanks so crews can inspect and fix them. So far, the work has not resulted in any reported complaints of low pressure.

by CNB