A BURST water main affects Ashley residents and Westmead businesses.
This main burst during the early hours of Wednesday (25 October) and the repair started at about 8am, when the TLB vehicle arrived to excavate the area to assess the extent of the repair. This repair was completed around noon and users received water at about 1pm.
This was the eighth main burst in Surprise Road this year.
At 10am this morning (Thursday, 26 October) I went to get some water and noticed that our water pressure was low and my neighbour confirmed that his was also low.
Suspecting that the main in Surprise Road had burst again, as this has occurred on previous occasions after repairs had been carried out, I visited the area at 11.45am. The water was flowing out of the ground, nearly six metres from the previous day’s repairs.
Metro water was present and were waiting for the TLB to arrive for the excavation to start. I revisited the site at about 2.45pm to find that the crack in the pipe had been located and the water was still draining as the isolation valve was broken and the water had had to be shut at the reservoir.
Based on this failure, it brings the total number of failures to nine in a 10-month period.
On Friday, 27 October we lost water pressure once again due to another water main burst in Surprise Road.
The burst was about 25 metres further up the road.
Fortunately there was a valve and it was working so the residents in Ashley only suffered from low water pressure until the valve was shut.
Ralph Adair
Pinetown
