By Jeff Lipton
Last Thursday, about 100,000 gallons of water gushed underground, opposite East Avenue, undermining the utility pole, which tipped toward moving traffic, officials said. Several Fourth Precinct police officers and the Emergency Services Unit of the police department were summoned to the scene to divert traffic away from the turnpike at 8 a.m. until the pole could be secured. Long Island Power Authority workers were summoned to the scene to stabilize and secure the pole. Officials from the Long Island Water Corporation were called in to assist them.
The County of Nassau was digging a very deep trench, and apparently some water main problem [developed], said Tracy Burgess-Levy, a spokeswoman for LIPA. I don't know why they are going down so deep. Going down 22 feet is rather deep for a sewer.
The county has been replacing antiquated sewer lines beside the GreenPoint Bank near the Five Towns Shopping Center on Rockaway Turnpike. The lines serve several stores in the neighborhood, including those in the shopping center, county officials said. The county had been working on the project for about two weeks when the work apparently produced vibrations that caused a nearby six-inch underground water main to crack in the early-morning hours of Wednesday, Sept. 24, spewing thousands of gallons of water every half hour, officials said.
They've had so much trouble with this project, said one LIPA worker who was called to the scene.
One county official who is overseeing the sewer project called it an emergency sewer job, with workers operating within five feet of the GreenPoint Bank. The project is designed to replaced an extremely old sewer system.
Complicating the water main break was the water flowing in from the nearby Old Hook Creek, officials said.
The incident marked the second time that workers encountered trouble in the two weeks that they had been replacing the sewer pipes. The first time, an old water main was unearthed and cracked.
Last week's water main break eroded the foundation that held the utility pole in place, shifting it to the side and causing the pole to tilt precariously over traffic. Immediately after it began to tilt, police were on the scene to divert traffic.
A LIPA truck with a line pole was brought in to hold the pole in place for hours until LIPA decided what to do with it. The pole could not be removed without causing a major inconvenience for area stores and homes, since it held power lines supplying electricity and telephone service. Officials considered digging another hole and bringing in another utility pole to reconfigure the lines.
Burgess-Levy said LIPA workers ended up installing an anchor to secure the pole in the ground, and used a guy wire to hold the pole in place. They have been working on this [sewer] project for a little while, she said. We have been watching this to make sure it would not affect, not impact the residents with outages.
This impacts a large area of customers, Burgess-Levy said. That's why we can't remove the pole. We can't de-energize the pole because we don't want to impact the customers.
County officials said it could take another month before the sewer project is finished.
This is troublesome for all of us, and we're working together to rectify it, said Burgess-Levy. We're hopeful the county can finish up this project.
