A business owner on Roosevelt Ave. in Jackson Heights Queens called Harris Water Main after noticing wet spots in the roadway in-front of his Grocery store. There was no indication that the owners water line was leaking, he was taking a precautionary measures to avoid the problem from getting worst in the case it was his pipe.
After brief investigation and a water main noise test performed with sono-scope leak detector, it was quickly determined that the water main was leaking due to a rumbling and vibration coming off of the buildings water line. The existing water line was made of lead, this left Harris Water no choice but to replace the entire pipe as it is 100% illegal to make a repair on a lead water main. The new installation is scheduled to start the next morning at 8 AM.
 |
 |
Upon arrival the Harris Water installation crew had to first setup all of the necessary safety and traffic precautions, Roosevelt Ave. is a very busy and heavily traveled road. Special traffic lanes were setup with barricades and cones along with flagmen on each side of the street to assist with traffic flowing as smooth as possible.
There was a total of 55’ of pipe that had to be replaced with copper, from the tap hole in the roadway to the inside of the building where a new ball valve will be installed. The crew first excavated the tap hole where they would close the tap connection to confirm that the leak was coming from the property owner’s pipe. This was easily determined as the water was seeping out of the tap connection to the city water main, which is common with dealing with old undersized tap connections. Harris now had to contact DEP for a new tap connection, it was possible that the existing tap may blow out of the city main at any second, it was literally holding on by 2 threads.
 |
 |
The crew continued to work on additional excavations and tunnels that would be used to pull the new copper water line from the street to inside the building. The DEP showed up within 1 hour and prepared for the installation of a new 1” tap connection on the city main which was completed within 20 minutes. The final tunnel was now made from the tap hole to the second hole in the roadway, located on the same side of the street as the building. The new 1 ¼” copper water line was now being pulled from one hole to the next, before it would enter the building and hook-up to the existing house piping. One hour later the new copper water main was installed on the new tap connection in the roadway which was opened and fully functional with no water leaks insight.
 |
 |
