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Here’s the other Oxford story

Water main breaks are pretty common. One broke in Oxford, Mississippi on the Square, earlier this summer. Parts of Van Buren Avenue and South Lamar were closed, and several restaurants were unable to serve patrons.

The Daily Mississippian reported that the line on the Square ruptured the afternoon of June 12, resulting in flooding and sedimentation on the streets. The report also said the 8-inch cast iron main ruptured due to a crack on the bottom side of the pipe. The line was repaired and the city was able to have the water back on by 9 p.m. the same day.

There was another story about the ruptured line on June 12, but it wasn’t reported.

“Main ruptures on the Square can be real tricky,” Chad McLarty said. He knows because he’s the Water Department Superintendent for the City of Oxford. “A repair crew may need to kill as many as 30 valves to stop the water on the Square.”

It takes approximately 26 turns to close an eight-inch gate valve. Multiply that by 30 and it equals an exhausted crew before repair work is factored into the equation.
Another story not reported was the difficulty in finding the valves and then cleaning out the boxes to get a valve wrench on them. “Sometimes it’s almost impossible to find them,” McLarty said. “About 85% of our valves are in the streets and sometimes paving crews cover them up. There could also be several inches of sediment or debris in the boxes.” There is a special hand tool designed to remove the debris but, according to McLarty, it’s not user friendly, and it’s a slow process.

Incidents like the one in Oxford routinely occur in towns and cities across Mississippi. The breaks can be the result of aging systems or damages caused by excavation projects. Either way, the account that usually gets reported omits the other story, and this time the other story involves two young men and a mission.

Chad McLarty works with Matt Davis, GIS Technician with the City of Oxford, and they spend a lot of time together. Several years ago the city conducted a comprehensive study that called for incorporating GIS into distribution database as well as updating water and sewer facilities. Under the direction of Bart Robinson, Director of Public Works for the City of Oxford, and Assistant City Engineer, Hunter McGonagill, McLarty and Davis are tasked with implementing a major part of the plan.
“They basically told us where they want to go and it’s up to us to figure out how to get there,” Davis said. “It’s not a fly-by-the-seat-of-our-pants approach, but we have been given the freedom to apply our ideas.”

One of the biggest challenges facing the two men has been operating and maintaining a distribution system with prints drawn in 1974 – they are not always accurate. McLarty said that within the next five years, his goal is to have a complete set of prints with GPS points for all valves. “With that, any member of the crew in an emergency situation can go out, find and turn off the right valves, and not waste time or himself,” he said.

“There’s a lot of data that we need that we don’t have right now,” Davis said. “We have the general location of things, but as far as asset management, we’re still working on it and we’re getting better.” Davis plans to have digital prints that will contain the status of each valve, including when it was last exercised and its operational attributes. “Eventually, we’ll have a laptop in every truck,” he said. “So a crewman can zoom down to his location and see everything around him and have all the information he needs to do his job.”

Another unreported story involves a new piece of equipment that incorporates a couple of older, well-established tools. It was McLarty’s idea and it came to him after he attended the Mississippi Damage Prevention Summit.

“I saw the equipment at the Summit and had an idea for developing a smaller version of it.” McLarty was talking about Vermeer’s vacuum excavation equipment. He was looking for a more economical system to clean valve boxes and routinely exercise them. “It just made sense to me,” he said. “The vacuum technology has been around for a while, and we came up with the basic idea and put it out for bid. Vermeer got the bid and built it for us. It’s compact, economical, and easy to move around, and we’ve been real happy with the way it works.”

With the valve exerciser and the vacuum excavator, a crew can clean and exercise more than twice as many valves as they could manually, McLarty said. “And the plus side is, they won’t be completely worn out at the end of the day.”

McLarty said it took about two hours to slow the water during the incident on the Square. “If we’d had this equipment two or three years ago and had all our valves located, exercised, and in good working order, we could have had the water slowed in 20 or 30 minutes instead of two hours,” he said.

The other story involves a lot of dedication and hard work. It involves public safety and protecting vital services from damages. It involves being a member of Mississippi 811 and being active in promoting stronger and more effective relationships with industry stakeholders.

The other story is about people, their work, and their ingenuity. It’s about change and two young men and a mission. “In two or three years,” McLarty said. “We hope to have something that will blow your mind. Come back then, and we’ll give you another story.”