The leak in Waitsfield’s municipal water system that is losing 60,000 or more gallons a day has been narrowed down to a 1.16-mile stretch of town between the Northfield Savings Bank and the Waitsfield-Fayston Fire Station.
That was the word from Nate Fredericks, water system manager for Simon Operating Services on January 27 after running isolation tests, systematically shutting down sections of the water system in the wee hours of the morning so see when the tank that feeds the system drops.
Fredericks will conduct his next night-time testing on Friday, January 30, between 2 and 4 a.m.
Starting December 11, Waitsfield’s municipal water system began losing some 60,000 gallons a day and Fredericks said the leak is unusually large and unusually hard to find.
Before the leak, the system averaged about 44,000 gallons a day in use. Since mid-December, that number has jumped to between 100,000 and 115,000 gallons daily.
Waitsfield’s system is gravity-fed: water is pumped from a well on Ronk Road to a storage tank on Bushnell Road, then flows downhill to customers without additional pumps. Using electronic monitoring and alarms tied to the tank, Fredericks can track changes in water levels and estimate how much water is leaving the system.
The leak is estimated at 20 to 45 gallons per minute – an amount that would normally surface quickly.
To narrow the search, the town has begun systematically isolating sections of the water system during overnight hours when usage is low. The work involves manually closing valves to shut off portions of the system, then watching the tank level in real time through electronic monitoring equipment.
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