On Feb. 23, 2015, a 20-foot section of a 24-inch water main ruptured, gushing 5.5 million gallons from the Bradford City Water Authority’s system in less than 90 minutes.
While crews worked tirelessly to repair the break within a day, a backflow of contaminated water necessitated a 17-day boil water advisory for thousands of customers.
Authority Executive Director Steve Disney said it was all “because we didn’t have any valves that were operational.”
Nine years later, the authority is set to receive $1.5 million in federal funding to help ensure an emergency of that scale never happens again.
Disney explained the funds will be used to rehabilitate the existing 24-inch transmission main, originally installed in 1955.
“We’ll use that money to put in new gate valves in order to control and achieve a very quick, efficient shutdown in case of a major break on the old 24-inch main,” he said.
The gate valves will be the second phase of a project begun four years ago, when the authority installed a second transmission main in the city.
“That’s a brand new main,” Disney stated. “If we had to shut down the old main we could still reroute and get water into the city.”
Gate valves will allow crews to isolate a break and keep the rest of the system operational until repairs can be made.
U.S. Rep. Glenn Thompson, R-Pa., was first to announce the funding Wednesday, although as Disney explained, the project had also appeared on the appropriations lists of both U.S. Sens. Bob Casey, D-Pa., and John Fetterman, D-Pa.
“I am pleased to announce $1.5 million in federal funding for the Bradford City Water Authority,” Thompson said. “Our wastewater treatment plants protect us from disease and pollution and it’s crucial we take action to keep the systems functioning properly. I look forward to the positive impacts this will have in Bradford and the surrounding municipalities.”
Disney said a representative from Casey’s office indicated the funds would be in hand by the end of 2024, and the authority would then have one year to spend the money.
“It crunches us a little,” Disney said, in terms of fitting the project in around the rest of the authority’s required work, “but we’ll do the engineering on it over the next few months. Once we get the money we’ll be ready to put the project out to bid.”
President Joe Biden on his Investing in America Tour in February announced $5.8 billion in funding for clean water infrastructure. That brought the total amount of clean water funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to more than $50 billion — the largest, White House officials state, investment in clean water in American history.
