The city paid about $12,800 to make emergency repairs to a pipe leading out of a booster station that left more than 500 homes in east Morgan Hill severed from the city’s water system for about 17 hours last month.
On Sept. 11, a fitting on a pipe under the Jackson Oaks booster station failed, according to city staff.
The damage occurred in a 12-inch 90-degree “elbow pipe” underneath the concrete floor of the booster station, according to city staff.
Because the booster station is the only way to deliver water to a storage tank up the hill on East Dunne Avenue to the Jackson Oaks and Holiday Lake Estate neighborhoods, the city had to fix the problem quickly.
They also did not have the staff or equipment to dig under the concrete and make a repair, so they hired Trinchero Construction out of San Martin to fix the problem on short notice, city staff said.
The money to pay the contractor came from the city’s water operations fund, and was budgeted for emergency repairs in the 2012-2013 city budget. The water operations fund is funded by water and sewer customers.
The disruption of service required city staff to fill the Jackson Oaks storage tank before making repairs. About 300 homes were without water for about five hours the morning of Sept. 13.
After the repairs were made, the city issued a “boil water notice” to be on the safe side, in case some of the water that backflowed into the system was contaminated. City crews delivered bottled water to the affected residents as a result.
The notice was lifted 48 hours later, after a series of tests determined the water was safe to drink, city staff said.
