East side high, dry
Waterline breaks leave schools, PD, court with little water

A sign at the Gallup Police Department says the building is closed due to no water on Tuesday. — © 2009 Gallup Independent / Brian Leddy

Copyright © 2009
Gallup Independent
By Leslie Wood
For the Independent

GALLUP — A series of waterline breaks left hundreds of Gallup residents without water and useable rest room facilities Tuesday.

City officials said the first break was in the Stagecoach area and the second was discovered along Toltec and Church Rock early Tuesday morning. A third break was found later Tuesday along Route 66 across from the Coca-Cola Bottling Company, but caused no disruption to water service.

As a result of the first two breaks that involved 10- and 14-inch lines, many eastside residents lost water pressure to their homes, which rendered rest room facilities useless.

Esther Macias, assistant superintendent for Gallup- McKinley County Schools, said the school district bussed in portable rest room facilities for students to use while three schools were without water pressure during the lunch hour.

The Rocky View, Kennedy and Miyamura campuses were affected by the outage. About 1,500 students attend the three schools.

“It’s lunch and kids are going to want to use the rest room,” Macias said of the predicament. “It’s been a real inconvenience.”

She said the outage also complicated school officials’ efforts to take appropriate hygiene precautions, such as hand washing, in light of the H1N1 threat. Students and staff instead used waterless soap that was imported along with the portable rest rooms to each of the affected campuses.

Indian Hills and Jefferson Elementary Schools were without water Tuesday morning. Trucks full of water were dispatched to the campuses to make the rest rooms useable until pressure was restored by late morning.

The business community was also affected by the lapse in water pressure.

Deputy Police Chief John Allen, of the Gallup Police Department, said the agency sent its six records clerks home Tuesday morning because of “a lack of lavatory services” due to the waterline breaks.

He described the break as a “minor inconvenience” for the department located on Boardman Avenue, but said the employees will resume work this morning. Municipal Court, which is housed within the police department, was also closed.

Mike Chavez, a resident of the Mossman area, said he wasn’t bothered by the lack of water pressure and a water flow that he described as a “slow trickle.”

“I’m sure they’ll get it fixed,” Chavez said.

He chose to focus on the bright side of a day without water use.

“ ... Later tonight, it might give me a good excuse to cook some steaks out on the grill.”

City crews, however, repaired the leaks by about 2 p.m. and continued to work to diagnose what caused the outage.

Lance Allgood, director of Gallup Joint Utilities, was not immediately available for comment about Tuesday’s waterline breaks. Ernest Thompson, local water and wastewater superintendent, did not return a request for comment by the Independent. Instead, Kevin Killough spoke on behalf of the city of Gallup about the issue.

He said air pockets in the pipes and aging infrastructure could have caused the breaks in the waterlines. He, however, did not confirm a single cause.