An attempt to plug a tricky leak

The Kerala Water Authority will on Saturday attempt to plug a leak which has been troubling not just the utility, but the Indian Railways as well, for quite some time now.

The issue is, the leak, suspected to be somewhere along the 500 mm pipeline that passes underneath the railway tracks at Thampanoor, is yet to be located and can take several hours to do so, not to forget the task that might be at hand if the leak is quite big.

Leak ignored

According to KWA officials, the leak had started as a minor one and was ignored for some time, about three months to be precise, until it started to form puddles near the railway tracks, even threatening to affect the signals there. With the Railway officials now calling up the KWA to check out what was happening beneath their tracks, the KWA will start excavating near the RMS compound wall on Saturday morning, and send one of their men into the huge duct through which the pipe passes.

“The person going in will have to make his way alongside the pipe through the duct, which might be around 100 metres long or maybe even more, and examine it till the other end near the compound wall on the Power House side. Detecting the leak itself might take a few hours and our first endeavour will be to see whether it can be plugged there itself. However, if it requires more intervention, that means the railway tracks might have to be dislodged and more area being dug up. We will be able to say that only by around 3 p.m. or 4 p.m. on Saturday,” a senior KWA official told The Hindu .

The KWA has already issued a notification, alerting the public that there could be a disruption in water supply from Saturday evening for about 24 hours.

However, officials said efforts were on to avoid the disruption of water supply to whatever extent possible and at the same time, there were other interconnections which would ensure that there was no major disruption.

Pending work

The KWA was also planning to make some progress with its pending work on shifting and relaying of pipes near the upcoming Thakaraparambu flyover at the same time. Connection work was likely to be taken up on the 400mm pipeline there, near the Parthas side, at the time when pumping through the mainline would be stopped for the work in the Railway compound. This work had been stalled since the onset of the monsoon, officials said.