By JOSEPH KELLARD
A section of the 600-foot main between Oceanside Road and the Waukena Avenue Bridge near Neptune Avenue broke at about 11 p.m. on Wednesday, October 15, flooding the street. LIW workers shut the pipe down by 2:30 a.m. and worked continuously until service was restored by 11 a.m. on Thursday, said G.J. Penza, a spokeswoman for Long Island Water.
"The leak was on an eight-inch cast-iron main that was installed in 1929, and they repaired a three-foot section," Penza explained.
As workers labored throughout the morning, a single lane of Waukena was kept open for limited traffic, and patch work on the large hole left in the street after the main was repaired stretched into the evening rush hour.
Waukena is a major roadway that allows motorists traveling from Oceanside, Island Park and Long Beach to avoid driving north to Merrick Road and Sunrise Highway to get to such towns as Baldwin, Freeport and Merrick. Before 5 p.m. last Thursday, Oceanside and Long Beach Roads were already seeing considerable traffic congestion.
"All I know is it took me a half hour to get from [Waukena] to School 3," said one motorist.
A contractor repairing the bulkhead on a home next to the Waukena Avenue bridge said, "The traffic here is bad enough in the morning for school, so you can imagine how bad it was when they closed down half the street."
Businesses as well as residences were affected by the inconvenience of being without water for several hours. "We were without water for about 12 hours," said Seymour Tenenbaum, a dentist whose office is at his Waukena Avenue home, "and there was no indication how long the repairs were going to take. So obviously I had to cancel patients."
Last week's leak was the latest in a series over the past decade involving the 600-foot main on Waukena. Others occurred in 1994, 1999 and 2003.
"The leaks aren't in the same spot," Penza said. "Once you replace them, that new pipe is not going to fail. The life of a water main is at least 100 years or longer. Age in itself is not always a factor. Soil in the area and traffic conditions affect it."
One resident, who declined to give his name, speculated that many trucks, which are over the weight limit for Waukena, contribute to the problem. "Those trucks are putting pressure on the piping when they go over it, and they're not doing 20 miles an hour, either -- they're flying by," he said. "I talked to the workers because I was concerned about the flooding on my property, and they told me they don't know if it's bad pipe in there, or possibly from all the trucks that come down here that are not supposed to be here."
Penza said vibrations from trucks can also contribute to weakening the pipes, but added that it's not unusual to have four breaks in the same area over a decade. "If it appears that in one area there are multiple leaks and problems with mains, we'll put them in the budget and then take care of them," she said. "So, [the Waukena main] may be one that we will take a closer look at, and we'll put it on our list to get it repaired."
