D.C. Water spokesperson Sherri Lewis said the water flow was restored after a series of tests were carried out by officials early Saturday.
“This morning, testing confirmed that flow can be safely returned to the pipe,” she said. “This is a huge day for all of our crews who have been working so hard to try and get this work done.”
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Back on Jan. 19, the massive 72-inch pipeline, known as the Potomac Interceptor, ruptured.
The leak sent 250 million gallons of untreated sewage into the Potomac River just north of Washington.
Lewis said that to make the emergency repair, the crew had to cut off all of the flow to the Potomac Interceptor downstream.
“So we installed this huge steel bulkhead gate that blocked all of the flow downstream. We got to work on the emergency repair, and today we were able to lift up that gate and let all of the water go back into the Potomac Interceptor,” she said.
Then the workers turned off the pumps so that nothing could go into the C&O Canal, “and we could start the cleanup efforts there,” Lewis said.
She said the cleanup effort was “herculean” and needed a large staff to fix the pipe.
“We’ve had an average of about 53 people just for D.C. Water out here. That doesn’t include our federal partners, who have also been out here working on the environmental rehabilitation and storm water management piece of things,” she said.
Some of the crew have been working in three shifts over the day in eight-hour shifts, or 12-hour shifts, Lewis said. “This is a 24-hour operation, because we had to keep those pumps running. Just to give you an idea of the magnitude of what was happening out here, to keep all those pumps and everything running, we were using enough fuel to power 11 to 12 American homes for an entire year.”
She said the crew was cleaning out “rags and wipes out of our pumps that were clogging” them.
“It’s been a lot of hard work, and I think everybody is really excited to get to this point. We still have a lot of work ahead,” she said.
The environmental rehabilitation work is still needed, which has begun on the C&O Canal. She said water is being held at Violet’s Lock, which will be used to flush out the canal into openings the workers were using to work on the bypass.
Lewis said the agency is looking at other areas along the Potomac Interceptor to make sure another rupture doesn’t happen again.
“The rocks and the boulders that were backfilled from the original construction exacerbated the situation that we had here because they blocked the entire pipe,” she said. “That’s not something you would normally see under standard industry backfill practices.
She said the agency is seeing what lessons can be learned from maintaining aging infrastructure. The Interceptor was built in the 1960s and completed in 1964.
WTOP’s Diane Morris and Jimmy Alexander contributed to this report.
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