Yorkton Council approved a tender for the City’s 2021 Water Main Replacement Program at its regular meeting Monday.
The tender went to KMS Construction Ltd. for $1,114,000 (plus taxes).
Money for the project comes from the 2021 Water Main Replacement of $709,000, 2021 Sanitary Sewer Replacement of $278,000 and the 2021 Water Works MEEP of $500,000.
As background Trent Mandzuk, Director of Public Works with the City told Council “a critical component to Public Health and economic well‐being is our City’s drinking water which is distributed to users through a vast underground piping system.
“Since most of this network is underground it is out of sight and often overlooked in comparison to other infrastructure such as roads and sidewalks.
“A 2018 study conducted by the Utah State University Buried Structures Laboratory indicated that water main breaks across North America have increased by an average of 27 per cent in the last six years. Cast iron (CI) pipes represent the largest pipe material inventory in North America. Eighty-two per cent of all CI pipe is over 50 years old and their break rates have increased significantly by 43 per cent since 2012 and are expected to continue to increase. Factors such as climate, pipe material, installation practices and soil types can greatly affect failure rates. Economic impacts from water main breaks include loss of treated water, increased maintenance budgets, overtime for service personnel and damage to City and private property”
Yorkton numbers are more concerning.
“The City of Yorkton has experienced an increase of 150 per cent in water main breaks and a 363 per cent increase in service connection breaks over the past five years,” detailed a report to Council.
The average water main break costs approximately $15,000 to repair and around $10,000 for a service connection leak.
“In 2019, the average lineal meter cost of water main replacement was $1,493.48 making the replacement value of the network $200 M in today’s dollars,” detailed the report. “The main replacement budget for 2020 has been increased 17 per cent from $545,000 in 2019 to $635,000. With this funding the distribution network is replaced once every 315 years.”
Cast iron water mains account for 100 per cent of the failures in the past five years.
“The average age of cast iron pipe in Yorkton’s distribution system is 75 years old. There is 40.4 km currently in the system which will take 95 years to replace based on current operational budget funding levels. This means that the last bit of cast iron pipe within the distribution network will be 170 years old before it is replaced,” noted Mandzuk.
