Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

The town of Windsor experienced a brief water outage on Tuesday, July 23, after an issue arose amid a fire hydrant replacement at the Windsor Volunteer Fire Department.

Town Councilman Walter Bernacki, who also serves as a lieutenant and public information officer with the WVFD, said the cause of the outage was not a systemic one.

“It was a repair that had a little glitch to it,” he said. “We overcame it as quickly as possible.”

He explained that the county had hired a contractor to replace a fire hydrant on the WVFD station grounds.

As the contractor was doing that work Tuesday around noon, a valve became displaced from the water line, allowing a free flow of water, Bernacki stated.

“When that happened, obviously, it dropped everyone’s water pressure in town to little to nothing,” he said.

Bernacki, town officials and the contractor were able to locate isolation valves that isolated the fire station grounds and restored water pressure to the vast majority of the town by around 1 p.m.

Pinpointing the cause of the valve displacement, Bernacki said he spoke to the contractor and learned that an incorrect connector was installed around 30 years ago when the original line and hydrant were put in.

“There’s a special type of connector that they’re supposed to use when you hook a steel valve to a plastic line, because the feed line coming onto the fire department property is a plastic line, which comes off the main at the road,” he said. “And apparently that connector wasn’t the correct type, so once they got down there, dug it up and removed the hydrant, it wasn’t strong enough to hold the water pressure, which hadn’t been isolated at that point in time, and it popped that valve loose.”

Bernacki said it was approximately noon Tuesday when, in his role as town councilman, he started receiving phone calls from constituents saying, “Hey, are you aware of no water pressure in town?”

“So that’s when I made a call to the Town Hall and spoke to officials up there who said, ‘Yeah, we’re getting tons of calls too. We’re trying to figure (it) out as well,’” Bernacki recalled. “And one of the officials up there said, ‘Hey, we got a call from (WVFD Fire) Chief (Lee) Marshall from the fire department that had asked about an isolation valve.’”

Bernacki said he then called and spoke with Marshall and drove to the fire station.

“That’s where I saw the water flowing and met with the contractor, and by then the town water officials were there, and we got a game plan together and found the isolation valve,” Bernacki said. “But it took probably about 45 minutes or an hour just because our mapping system is still on paper, and it just took a little while to read through the diagrams and all of that stuff. We’ll make that correction in the future. That’s a note that I’m going to make as a council person to say, ‘Hey, is there any way that maybe we can look at putting this on a (geographic information computer system) just so it’s more accurate, more readily available in the future when stuff like this happens?’”

Water service was restored to most of the town by around 1 p.m., it was restored to the WVFD station around 2:30 p.m. with the completion of the work on the hydrant, and it was restored to a small section of Roberts Avenue around 5 p.m.

Bernacki noted that the outage lingered longer on part of Roberts Avenue because of a leaking saddle valve on a residential line there.

Explaining what a saddle valve is, he first noted that getting water to a residence involves tapping a main water line.

“The valve they use to do that is called a saddle valve, and over time they can either corrode or malfunction, and that’s apparently what may have happened,” he said. “The only information I was given is that one was leaking, and it had to be repaired. But to do that, you have to shut the line down.”

The contractor replacing the hydrant at the WVFD station was able to effect that repair.

“Once they got done at the fire station, they went over to the Roberts Avenue location and corrected that and then got water flowing to that area once that repair was made,” Bernacki said.

He noted that had a fire happened during the water outage at the fire station, the WVFD had a contingency plan in place.

“It was to request additional mutual aid tankers to respond in the event of a reported structure fire, so we would have had adequate water coming, and that was our backup plan,” he said.