On Monday, March 20th, city crews started working on a water main break on Duncan Drive, from Douglas Road to 13th Street in the City of Weyburn.

The street is closed to local traffic, with the project anticipated to wrap-up on Wednesday, March 22nd. 

Jennifer Wilkinson, Director of Engineering for the City of Weyburn, explained that over the winter season, they haven't seen a lot of water main breaks. 

"Sometimes, obviously we'll have a service connection that will fail and those ones are a little bit smaller. The spring time is actually a little more susceptible to it because you have the ground starting to thaw and you see a bit more of that heaving."

Wilkinson shared that this is the time of year where they are watching things a bit more closely.

"We'd recommend if you do see water coming up and it looks suspicious, to call the city and notify us and we will send crews out to find that leak and determine what it is. Obviously the sooner we know about it, the sooner we can get it repaired."

Recently, City Council awarded a replacement of a water main on Railway Avenue.

"What we do every year, is we actually go and we look at our water main break data and we take that data to determine where we should replace water mains."

She explained that it's a good maintenance program to replace the mains before they break, and they do about one a year. "Also on top of that, we do replacement of valves where we notice we have issues with valves on the water main."

"We do have a program again this year to go and do manholes, hydrants and valves," Wilkinson explained, "just to make sure that we are trying to catch them before they break."

Wilkinson added that when they do have a water main break, they encourage people to avoid the area, "because we do have a lot of traffic and maintenance and it sometimes takes us a bit to find it because where it comes up isn't necessarily where the break is."

 

 

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