Crews Busy Repairing Dozens Of Water Line Breaks In Just A Few Days

City of Tulsa crews are repairing dozens of water line breaks.

They say they’ve worked on as many as 30 breaks in just the past few days.

Those water line breaks have left some Tulsans without water for up to 24 hours.

“I think Saturday night around midnight there were 14,” said Jeff Bush.

One of the pipes that burst over the weekend was seen shooting water into the air for about 45 minutes.  The City says have responded to several more calls about breaks on Monday.

“In the winter it’s easy to explain because it gets so cold that things can burst and the usage from the plants goes down,” said Bush.  “In the summer it gets hot, the ground dries up, it shifts, the usage goes up so the plants have to put more out, and that can cause strain on the pipes.”

Bush says the high number of breaks forced the City to pick and choose which breaks they fix first.  He says some from over the weekend had to wait until Monday because others were causing more damage.

The City says each break can take anywhere from two to ten hours to repair.

“First we locate the valves.  We have all those resources to look at the valves.  We isolate it and we notify the residents, if they still have water, we tell it’s going to be out for however many hours we think.  We turn it off, then we just start to dig where the water is coming out,” explained Bush.

The City has a hotline to call to report a water break or outage, (918)596-9488.