Traffic snarls from water main blowouts continue in OKC

Last Updated on July 25, 2023, 8:46 AM | Published: July 25, 2023

OKLAHOMA CITY — Drivers in northwest and west OKC have been forced to find new routes on their daily drives this summer.

Water main blowouts that happened within the first week in July didn’t just create mechanical challenges for the City of Oklahoma City crews.

Massive sinkholes created when the large feeder water lines broke at full pressure are also the issue in getting the roadway back to normal.

Artery streets affected in that quadrant of the city include the busy intersection of NW 23rd and Council Road and a stretch of N. Meridian between 50th and 63rd.

The traffic slowdowns and detours of those areas add an unexpected set of issues for traffic that the city already had anticipated being slowed down from street and sidewalk improvements being made all over the city this summer.

Rain, then heat

The unusually wet spring and summer soaked up the clay under northwest OKC, then the heat started drying it out quickly.

“The high temperature fluctuations that we see in the middle of summer and really deep temperature changes in the winter as well … have an impact on our clay soils, which, as you know, are very absorptive,” Jennifer McClintock told Free Press in the first week of July.

McClintock is the public information officer for the Utilities Department in Oklahoma City.

“A lot of these lines can get shifted, and it can cause cracks,” McClintock said. “And it doesn’t have to be an immediate thing. Oftentimes, what we discover once we get in there is it looks like the crack might have been there months prior, but that it was slow enough or small enough that it was leaking slowly and the substrate was slowly being eroded by the water coming out.”

Different timetables

The damage done to particular water main parts at blowout sites isn’t uniform. Neither is the age or type of parts damaged.

Some can be repaired quickly and put back in service because the parts are already on hand. But, the substrate to the roadway and the surface still have to be repaired which means filling in pouring a concrete repair base to support the weight of traffic, and then the asphalt surface and striping.

In the case of the blowout at NW 56th Terrace and Meridian, the Utilities Department had to order a part.

And the sinkhole itself was massive, requiring a considerable amount of work.

“So you’ve got all of this these methods that they have to do in order to make sure that the main is secure and then they can build up the street back over it,” said McClintock.

NW OKC soils create problems

In the same night of the NW 56th and Meridian blowout, a neighborhood blowout only a few blocks west in Rollingwood caused a quick flood down a hill that threatened water damage in multiple homes downhill.

Several families on a curve in the street had to quickly use sandbags and sheets of plywood to turn the bulk of the water on down the street instead of into their driveways and garages.

Less than a mile away only a month earlier, a water main blowout on NW 63rd a block east of Meridian caused that stretch of the busy arterial street to be completely closed for days and half of the street for longer.

Water main break fully closes OKC NW 63rd Street for days

McClintock told us that the combination of different soils, weather changes, and varying ages of pipe in the water system mean that it’s difficult for engineers to anticipate where the next problem will arise.

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