Tuscaloosa Rushes to Repair Major Broken Sewer Line After 275,000-Gallon Leak

The Tuscaloosa City Council is rushing to approve expensive emergency repairs to a major sewer line that was badly damaged last week, causing a leak that has since been stopped.

In a Tuesday afternoon meeting of the council's Projects Committee, Michael Gardiner made an urgent request for an estimated $430,000 to fix the problem.

Gardiner told the city council that last week, during heavy rain events, a problem caused by a failing storm drain pipe reached critical mass.

Gardiner said the issue is near High County Apartments and Regal Point Apartments on Cypress Creek Avenue off Skyland Boulevard.

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The storm drain, which is made of corrugated metal, failed and was allowing some of the huge amounts of rainwater that passed through it to instead get outside the pipe and into the ground around Cypress Creek Avenue.

That underground flow undermined the soil around it, and as the earth washed out, eventually, there was no longer enough structural integrity to hold up the storm drain line.

Wastewater - the stuff you flush down toilets and shower drains - and rainwater are carried in different systems in Tuscaloosa, but the storm drain line collapsed sometime around last Thursday and crushed a large clay sewer line, breaking it open and causing a sewage leak.

The city self-reports its sewer leaks and overflows to the Alabama Department of Environmental Management, and on May 10th, reported a spill of 275,200 gallons of sewage into Cypress Creek.

"That's an 18-inch sewer line, so it's one of our fairly major conveyance lines for sanitary sewer," he said. "We began immediately, with the assistance of Water & Sewer, to set up a bypass - to plug the leak and start bypass pumping the sewage."

Gardiner said has also been talking to contractors at Price Civil Services, Inc. for emergency repairs.

They will replace the damaged sewer line and add a new structure with a new 42-inch storm drain running to Cypress Creek, among other fixes.

Gradiner said he got a very rough cost estimate on repairing the problem on Tuesday morning, hours before the committee meeting, and that loose number was $433,000.

"We need to proceed on this as quickly as possible," Gardiner said. "We're going to pull this money out of our neighborhood drainage fund. We do have the money to cover this. In our neighborhood drainage fund, the balance we have left - we have items programmed that we were working toward getting to - projects that were under design or getting ready to bid. This needs to take precedence over some of these other items that are not so critical in nature."

The city council is expected to suspend normal rules and vote to approve the repairs on Tuesday night, rather than wait until next Tuesday as an expenditure this large would normally require.

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