PEA RIDGE — Slowly, tediously Jacob Wagner - guided by directions from men standing nearby - directed a backhoe’s bucket into the ditch.

Pea Ridge Water and Wastewater Department employees Michael Arredondo, Mike Nida, Kurtis Wiltgen and Ronnie Hicks peered into the ever-deepening hole Wagner made.

“Try to scoop some of that over there - now, curl, curl.

Put it right there. Easy,” directed Hicks.

“Ho, ho, ho,” Arredondo cried out, trying to stop Wagner as the back-hoe’s bucket dug into the ground.

“Now shave this bank off,” Nida told Wagner.

The group moved slowly, lest they accidentally rupture the old water line they know is down in the dirt - somewhere. Once they find the line, they will replace it, thereby reducing water lost through leaks in the aging pipes in Brush Creek. The lines are more than 30 years old.

Flexible pipe (poly tubing) and sleeving, along with a tracer wire, lay in wait to replace the leaking lines.

Grabbing shovels, Hicks and Nida pulled dirt away from the suspected location of the water line.

Arredondo stood ready with an electronic listening device to pinpoint the leak.

Water began spraying from a break in the line. Mud coated their boots, pants legs and arms as they dug further - often by hand - to uncover the pipe.

The blue sleeve, which will surround the new water lines, protects them from being punctured by the alltoo-common rocks in the Ozarks. The tracer wire is placed alongside the lines to facilitate finding lines in the future.

“This is the super chicken,” Arredondo said as he displayed the locator box which receives the signals sent by the tracing wires.

Not much traffic interrupted the work in the quiet subdivision. A buck deer ambled across the roadway, carefully watching the workers. An occasional breeze punctuated the oppressive heat. Rain did not stop the work, although lightening will, Arredondo said.

The boring machine sat ready to drill a hole beneath the roadway once the lines were located.

“This - searching for lines - eats your time up,” Nidasaid. “It’s a slow process.”

The Pea Ridge system has the lowest water loss of any public water system in northwest Arkansas other than XNA, noted Water/Wastewater Department superintendent Ken Hayes: “And they have a brand new water system.”

“(Replacing old water lines) is something we’ve worked hard at. I started in about ’05. We’ve definitely worked hard at it,” Hayes said. The work had paid off, because the system loses only 12 percent of the water put into the pipes. Some systems in the region lose as much as 75 percent, Hayes said.

In most of the city’s system, the water loss in is down to 9 percent, but in Brush Creek it is 34 percent, making the overall city average about 12 percent.

In 2004, water loss was about 60 percent.

To find leaks, Water Department employees trace the route of the lines. Finding the lines is hard because tracer-wire technology was not used 30 years ago, meaning, nobody really knows where the lines are buried.

Finding them takes a combination of detective, treasurer hunter and mind reader.

When a leak is found, they notify OneCall, a company that locates and marks utility lines. Those utility lines - gas, phone, electric - are marked by orange, yellow and red paint.

Then, the hard work begins - digging out the lines and replacing them. All the new lines within the system have tracer wires making locating them easier.

The city purchases water from Two-Ton, then sells it to customers. The difference between water purchased, water used and water sold reflects water loss.

Hayes explained that water loss is basically the difference in the water purchased and water sold.

There are several means of water loss - leaking pipes, firefighting, flushing dead-end hydrants.

“Everybody’s got leaky lines. They’re designed to have a permissible water loss. For every joint, there’sa fac- tor,” Hayes said, adding that the older the lines, the greater the probability of water loss.

“We’ve still got a lot of galvanized lines,” he said.

“That line down (Arkansas Highway) 94 is over 40 years old. There are lines in town at least 50 or 60 years old,” Hayes said.

He noted that the city’s probably got 90 miles of water lines.

Pea Ridge owns the water lines in Brush Creek, now within the Rogers city limits. There are 302 water customers in Brush Creek.

“Whenever it was built, they didn’t put the lines under the roads in sleeving. Some of those lines have been repaired so many times ... we’re going in, boring under the road and putting new lines in,” he said.

Hayes said thenew sounding equipment - Fluid Conservation Systems preamplifier-transducer system and correlation equipment - makes their work easier, but takes a lot of practice to learn to use.

“They guys in the Water Department are very good at it,” he said. “It’s pretty high tech. We’ve had it for five or six years.”

Because of the decline in water loss, Hayes said the city purchases about the same amount of water it purchased in 2005 even though the number of water customers has increased. In 2005, there were 1,600 water customers. In 2010, there are 2,250.

“We’re virtually buying the same amount,” Hayes said, “but selling more of it.”ALWAYS AVAILABLEEmployees of the Pea Ridge Water/Wastewater Department take turns being on call. Monday, Aug. 9, was no different as they received a call of water shooting about two feet in the air from a water

line break in Brush Creek. The men responded and

worked for several hours to repair the leak, according to Mike Nida, utility inspector.

Community, Pages 7 on 08/11/2010