Last week’s water main break in Tempe was a serious headache for commuters. But the cause of that break goes back 50 years.
Some 800 miles of water lines run beneath the city of Tempe. About 250 miles are cast iron, a popular material used in the 1960s.
And that’s exactly what cracked when a section of McClintock Drive flooded, causing a city bus to become trapped in a sink hole.
Marilyn De Rosa is the city’s deputy public works director. She wasn’t all that surprised where the break occurred.
"We’re finding most of failures over last 10 or 20 years are occurring in the cast iron pipe," De Rosa said.
De Rosa said the city experiences an average of one failure a day, most are minor. Of those failures, about 80 percent of them occur in cast iron.
She said the city is doing preventive maintenance and replacing pipes where necessary.
"We’re identifying neighborhoods that are experiencing the highest rate of failures and we’re trying to get out there and replace those lines before the failures occur," De Rosa said.
De Rosa said preventative maintenance is less expensive than emergency repairs.
