PORT TOWNSEND — Crews from Seton Construction and Port Townsend city staff are working around the clock to replace 300 feet of sewage pipe on Water Street.
A sinkhole occurred at the intersection of Water Street and the ferry terminal following a break in a main sewer pipe leading into Labor Day weekend.
“Seton Construction are working basically two crews 24/7 to try to get this fixed and wrapped up and get out of here by the time the Wooden Boat Festival gets started up on Friday,” said Steve King, the Port Townsend public works director.
As of Wednesday, about half of the pipe had been replaced, King said. The pipe is projected to be fully laid by Thursday morning, with the expectation that it will be backfilled, compacted and paved by Friday, he added.
Crews were on site about 12:30 p.m. on Saturday, King said.
“We had a report that there was a depression in the pavement, like there was a sinkhole starting,” he said. “When I got there, it hadn’t fallen in, but there was just this big almost like a hole in the pavement, maybe 6 feet across, where the pavement was starting to cave in.”
City crews coned off the area from traffic and cut the pavement open, King said.
“As soon as we put a jackhammer on it, it punched through,” King said. “You could tell it was a big hole under the pavement. This is a sewage force main, which means it comes from pumps, so every time the pumps turn on, a leak would show up. The pumps turned on and we saw sewage show up and we went, ‘Oh boy, now we know what we have, a broken sewer pipe.’”
The pumps turn on based on usage, and being late at night, they were only turning on every 15 to 20 minutes, for a moment or so, King said.
During the day, they are under much heavier usage, turning on every few minutes.
King said it’s one of the heaviest-usage pipes in Port Townsend, as it serves all of downtown and uptown.
The cavity under the pavement was caused by soil being sucked into the pipe along the break whenever the pump activated, King said.
He added that the timing was lucky. If it had happened during busier traffic hours, a heavy vehicle would have been likely to break the pavement and fall into the hole.
“We couldn’t fix the pipe,” King said. “The pipe was so rotten, meaning compromised, that we were unable to make a repair.”
Sewage is being diverted around the break area with gasoline pumps and hose going along the street to the next maintenance hole, where it is fed back into the pipe, King said.
King reported that in spite of the location and the event occurring during a busy weekend, traffic was not heavily impacted.
“Ferries did a great job,” King said. “We talked with Olympia traffic control office at WSDOT, and then we also talked with the local ferries staff, and they kept people off of SR 20 and kept traffic moving. They’ve been doing an amazing job, and it’s worked out OK, and it’s all because of their efforts keeping the ferry traffic off SR 20.”
In 2022, there was a collapse in the same pipe, about 2,000 feet away, King said. Based on that incident, the city secured funding through the state public works board. The funding is a 50 percent low-interest loan and 50 percent grant, King said.
This emergency work is being partially funded by that money and partially by emergency reserves in the city’s sewer fund, King said.
“We have about a 90 percent design complete,” King said. “We were planning on replacing all of this pipe this winter. This little emergency is just accelerating a portion of that job. We’ll continue with the bigger job this winter.”
That project is planned to take place on Water Street from where this emergency replacement leaves off near the ferry terminal to the intersection of Gaines Street and Water Street by the Wells Fargo bank.
“The extent of the project is that we’re planning on directional drilling about 2,000 feet of high-density polyethylene force main,” King said. “The old gravity line only has a few businesses on it. We will slip-line on an 8-inch poly pipe inside the old 12-inch.”
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Reporter Elijah Sussman can be reached by email at elijah.sussman@sequimgazette.com.
