A water crisis that brought Fort Lauderdale to its knees this week further exposed the frailty of the city’s water/sewer system, spotlighting years of neglect that could leave the city in the same predicament at any time.
Lack of maintenance turned a manageable mistake into a system collapse that dried up faucets for tens of thousands of people and forced countless businesses to shut down.
A contractor for Florida Power & Light set off the situation Thursday when its workers drilled into a critical water main, but the fiasco could have been contained quickly. Had the system worked properly, officials acknowledged, water would have been diverted to another pipe, and few people would have known there was a breach.
Instead, underground valves that hadn’t been tested in years failed and created a crisis affecting some 220,000 people. Even after service was restored, residents were ordered to boil their contaminated water before consuming it.
“The fact that this accident occurred is a wake-up call for us to understand the urgency of addressing this need,” Mayor Dean Trantalis said Friday.
Trantalis said he was told the city had trouble locating the right valve to shut off water to the broken pipe and divert it to another pipe. The valves hadn’t been touched or tested in eight years, he said.
City officials and observers said the water outage highlighted the importance — and inadequacy — of the Fiveash Regional Water Treatment Plant, which supplies most of the city’s drinking water. Built in 1954 and falling apart, it must be renovated for $144 million, or replaced, a consultant advised. If that’s not done in time, another crisis like Fort Lauderdale saw this week could occur.
That wouldn’t be a surprise to those immersed in the city’s water-sewer woes. Two years ago, the consultant warned that the plant faces “the very real risk of calamitous failure.”
“We have known that the Fiveash Water Treatment Plant has been kept together by spit and chewing gum for many years,” Trantalis said, “and we know we need to either rebuild it, replace it or find a new methodology in which to supply customers with drinking water.”
The city is studying whether to build a plant capable of treating saltwater, through reverse osmosis.
Fort Lauderdale for years did not properly maintain its water-sewer system. That neglect became apparent in recent years, when 20.6 million gallons of sewage overflowed into yards and waterways. More than a third of the city’s water mains are more than 60 years old — and are being eroded by salty groundwater, the South Florida Sun Sentinel reported in 2016.
Marilyn Mammano, who leads the city’s infrastructure task force, said she thinks the tide has turned in Fort Lauderdale, and people are paying attention. The city is spending millions on repairs and has agreed to stop using water-sewer money on unrelated expenses in the budget each year. She praised the city for its handling of the water crisis this week.
Still, the to-do list is mind boggling. The city’s utility needs total $1.4 billion in work over 20 years, according to a report by Reiss Engineering of Winter Springs.
“We’re working our way through this backlog and it’s going to be very painful,” Mammano said. “It’s a big job and it’s only just begun.”
Reiss warned the city in its 2017 report that some repairs at Fiveash are urgent fixes that “affect the ability to produce and monitor safe drinking water.”
A complete replacement of the plant, the report said, would “reduce the very real risk of a calamitous failure.”
Trantalis said the city should have been testing and ensuring that the valves and redundant pipes leading to Fiveash were operational. But it’s just one of many weak points in the city’s aging system.
“Whatever system was installed years ago is certainly inadequate to respond to emergency situations like this,” he said. “Going forward we have to replace redundant systems as well as the primary system, and be sure they’re tested more frequently.”
The pipe was broken Wednesday by Florida Communication Concepts, a subcontractor doing work for Florida Power & Light, a city police report says.
The 42-inch pipe carries water from underground wells to the Fiveash plant off Powerline Road, southeast of Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport, where it’s treated and distributed to faucets in Fort Lauderdale, Oakland Park, Tamarac, Wilton Manors, Davie, Port Everglades, Lauderdale-by-the-Sea and Sea Ranch Lakes.
No one gives it a thought, until it breaks.
“Without that 42-inch pipe, you don’t have a Fort Lauderdale. You don’t have restaurants, you don’t have businesses. The toilets don’t work,” said Mammano, a planner by trade. “Sometimes, you need an example to show you the things you don’t think about are sometimes the the most important things.”
