City of College Station continues to investigate cause of Rock Prairie water leak

COLLEGE STATION, Texas (KBTX) – The city of College Station doesn’t know what caused a water line to break Sunday morning or how many gallons wound up spraying into the air before it was stopped.

“We got calls of low water pressure and obviously people could see the water coming out of the ground from the pipe, so we immediately dispatched crews to address the leak,” said Jennifer Nations, College Station Water Resource Coordinator.

Both the College Station Police Department and Fire Department were called to help with the major water break on Rock Prairie Road in front of Bachman Park.

“What we did was we blocked traffic to make sure the crews could work safely and get it under control. We also went around the area for flooding and damage and to see if we could help in any way with the local residents who were affected,” said Stuart Marrs, the College Station Fire Department Public Information Officer.

The giant out-pour of water affected the Johnson’s family home on the corner of Rock Prairie Road and Bahia Drive. The family tells KBTX they removed their carpet because of the water damage.

“You can see there is a hole in the bottom of the pipe so some part of it failed and then the water came out from there,” said Nations.

The city says the impressive stream of water can be compared to putting your thumb at the opening of the garden hose, causing the stream to spray out intensely.

“The cause for the rather impressive stream of water that we saw yesterday: it’s a 30-inch diameter pipeline where water is normally flowing at a typical rate through, but with the size of the break we had, water was all of a sudden flowing through a much smaller hole, so that constricted the flow and caused the velocity of the water to increase which is why we saw it spraying out so far,” said Nations.

Monday, crews cut out the damaged section of the pipe and installed a new pipe.

The city of College Station says the Southwood Community Center will be out of water until the city fixes the break.

The city says residents as far south as Castlegate were experiencing low water pressure Sunday.

“If the water is flowing from this way to this way, people on this side of the pipe are going to still have water. But if there’s a break like we had yesterday, and the water is going this way, then the people downstream of that are going to notice that there is no water flowing to their house so that’s why we had the low water pressure yesterday,” said Nations.

The city of College Station says they are still investigating what caused the water break as crews work to make repairs. They hope the pipe break will be fixed by the end of the day on Monday.

The City of College Station says they don’t have a total cost of the damage until the repair is complete and the invoice has come in.