If you were in town any time Saturday, Jan. 31, you would have noticed it. Low water pressure. Then no water at all. Around 10:30 Friday night the alarm in Kimball’s water treatment plant went off. It notified the city’s public works on-call employee that there was a problem. It could have meant any kind of problem. Jillian Holte, the newest city employee, quickly arrived at the plant. She called in Paul Hoeschen, the city’s water and sewer consultant. Once Paul arrived and checked out the panels, he figured the alarm was probably set off by low water pressure caused by a broken water main. He sent Jill out “to drive around town looking for water squirting out of the ground.” It didn’t take long to find it – a water main near Schmidty’s Conoco station, just north of Highway 55 on Magnus Johnson Street had burst. Because that pipe is relatively shallow underground, and there has been little snow cover for insulation, Hoeschen believes the pipe froze and then burst, perhaps hours before water was visible above ground. Kuechle Underground was called and alerted to the problem. Repairs would need to be made soon, but first the city had to call Gopher State for “locates” on all the utilities within a 50-foot radius of the break. It took awhile to get all the locates, but no digging could begin without them. Kuechle called in Lonnie Hendricks to help. “I was pretty impressed with their work and their timeliness – especially with the frost,” said Hoeschen. The repair was completed around mid-afternoon Saturday. While Kuechle and Hendricks worked through the frozen ground to dig up and replace the broken main, Hoeschen made calls to fix the next weather-related problem: The water tower froze Yes, like several other communities in Minnesota during the sub-zero weather last week, Kimball’s water tower froze. After consulting with the tower service company, Hoeschen now understands how that happened. The tower did not freeze first. The main burst, then the tower froze. The fill pipe (also called the stem or riser) is the four-foot wide pipe running up the center of the water tower. Depending on consumer usage and whether the pumps are running, water can freely flow up the fill pipe into the tower, or down the fill pipe into water mains and to homes and businesses in Kimball. In winter, it is common for much of the fill pipe to be frozen. Hoeschen estimates that only about a 12-inch hole remained unfrozen in Kimball’s fill pipe. “Kind of like a straw,” he explained. This would normally be more than sufficient. Most of the year, the water tower is kept full. In winter, however, it’s usually kept half-full (that’s about a one-day supply of water). And the water level is shifted up or down many times during the week to reduce ice build-up inside the tower. With consumer usage of a half-filled water tank, there is high turnover of the water itself, which also helps reduce ice build-up. The abnormal rush of water out of the tower through the broken main sucked down along with it a chunk of ice that jammed into that 12-inch opening. No more water flowed in or out of the tower. No more exchange of water. No more water movement. Ice. The first company Hoeschen contacted Saturday morning to come out and thaw the water tower was not available until Monday afternoon. The second company was already in New Germany thawing a water tower there, but they arrived around 2:30 Saturday afternoon and set to work. That was H & H Contracting from Sleepy Eye. Just how do you thaw a frozen water tower that’s 160 feet in the air, anyway? Very carefully. As it turns out the tank was not completely frozen. There was about a foot of ice floating on top of the remaining water. So, first H & H brought in a special water heater fed by a garden hose. Water was heated quite hot and sent out through a half-inch hose that went directly into the tank. Then they climbed up a ladder on the side of the tank. One man actually got inside the tank with freezing and frozen water. (Somebody had to.) He pulled the hot-water hose into the tank and pushed it into the ice, burrowing holes into it with the gushing hot water. Once he got through the foot of ice on the surface, he pushed the hose about 10 feet down into the ice clog at the top of the flow pipe. By about 10 p.m. he had melted about a three-inch hole through the ice clog – enough to restore water flow. He melted another hole through the clog, just for good measure. H & H was packed up and gone by midnight. As of about 10 p.m. Saturday, said Hoeschen, everything was okay in Kimball’s water system. The only difference – undetectable to water users – is that they run the pumps manually instead of automatically. Here’s why: A third (minor) problem
The night the water tower froze in Kimball
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