Beachside water pressure problems – which allowed a Satellite Beach home to be claimed by fire during Hurricane Matthew in October 2016 – have helped speed up the purchase of a new pump station generator to prevent a repeat disaster.
The barrier island water customers served by City of Melbourne Utilities were “isolated” from the rest of Melbourne’s water system by manually shutting two valves after dire hurricane predictions just prior to landfall of Hurricane Matthew, such as a predicted 13-foot storm surge, met criteria to do so, said Ralph Reigelsperger, Melbourne’s Public Works/Utilities director.
Prediction criteria met by Hurricane Matthew, which weakened as it veered east at the last minute, were a storm path near Brevard and a storm intensity of more than Cat 3.
Isolation of the barrier islands is a seldom-used safety measure in advance of a major storm designed to prevent a large leak or other damage from quickly draining. With barrier islands evacuated, timely repairs would be impossible.
Even isolated, the beachside system had been designed to maintain pressure by pumps with emergency generators, and there is enough storage capacity to maintain hydrant pressure. However, during Hurricane Matthew, a faulty automatic transfer switch at the generator at the Canova Beach pumping station caused the beachside water system pressure to drop to nearly zero, resulting in low water pressure in the hydrants and ‘boil water’ notifications.
Other City of Melbourne water-systems improvements already underway include a $12 million project to bury a new water main supply along Pineda Causeway.
The bigger improvements to the system will come as a result of the additional water main line at Pineda, along with two others located at Avenue B and at State Road 192 in Melbourne. The new line will have a special switch which will close automatically in case of a pressure drop. It will be buried rather than attached to the causeway bridges because of structural considerations.
“The Pineda crossing provides us the reliability to be able to do repairs (without service interruption) if problems come up. There some of our pipes that are 50 years old,’’ Reigelsperger said.
