HOWARD — Fiber-optic crews boring their way through Apple Valley are racking up costs for county taxpayers.
So far, companies have not reimbursed the county for damages.
Jeff Pickrell, director of the Knox County Water and Wastewater District, told the county commissioners that crews installing broadband have damaged water mains, sewer lines and meter equipment.
“They have hit us in excess of 25, we believe closer to 30 times, so far,” Pickrell said. “We’re doing repairs, major water lines, sewer lines, they ran directly through manholes, through people’s laterals.”
Damage includes a 6-inch water main struck head-on by a boring machine, a sewer line “reamed” along its top and a manhole drilled through its center.
Pickrell cited one incident where the crew set the boring machine on top of a meter pit and tried to hide that they broke both the meter pit and the smart point transmitter used for remote meter reading and leak detection.
“We’ve talked about [inflow and infiltration] before, and that’s still a problem, but how many of these laterals have they hit that people haven’t had problems with yet, or that are there for future building sites that we’re not going to know about?” he asked.
“Did they just create even more problems for us?”
Pickrell said the county has repeatedly told the contractors to stay at a depth of about 2 feet to avoid utility lines. Instead, crews have been boring 4 to 6 feet deep.
The water main that was struck was hit by a crew working at 6 feet, he said.
Damages create havoc with budgets
Pickrell said Knox County is not an isolated incident; problems are occurring statewide.
He attributed the pace and carelessness to pressure from state and federal funding deadlines.
“This federal money, state money, they’ve got to get this stuff done by the end of October, which is totally unrealistic. But they’re just going like crazy,” he said.
Pickrell said the drillers are out-of-state crews hired to meet the October deadline.
As a result of the damage, Pickrell said his crews have gotten very little done on county projects, including installing water services for new houses under construction.
“We’re not getting some of the stuff that we had goals of trying to get done, done,” he said.
“We have one employee who that’s all he does, locates [lines] for them because they call so many in. We were at a point where we were between 50 and 80 locates a day,” Pickrell said.
“We’ve had a boatload of overtime. Guys had to stay over, guys had to come in on the weekends.”
Pickrell said the overtime is really cutting into his budget.
“We’re going back to look at where our salaries, payroll and stuff are at because I did not anticipate that much overtime,” he said.
“It’s money that goes out. If we get paid, it goes back in, but it goes back in for next year.”
Pickrell has invoiced the companies $36,000 in damages as of the end of August. That does not include two recent repairs, each of which were over $5,000.
Although the companies indicated they would pay, they have not done so.
However, Pickrell said the companies will suspend installation for a couple of months while they review their process.
