ORANGE — The town administrator plans to explore funding sources to repair a faulty culvert that was discovered when workers were connecting a sewer pipe underneath East Main Street.
“As we were moving along East Main Street, fixing a sewer line that’s 100 years old and 15 feet deep in the ground, it kept getting flooded by water and we weren’t exactly sure where the water was coming from,” Matthew Fortier said during Wednesday’s Selectboard meeting. “And as we got farther up the road, we ran into a culvert underneath East Main Street. The culvert is carrying the water from the Fall Brook, which starts up at the beaver pond behind [Fisher Hill Elementary School].”
Fortier explained the water from the beaver pond runs down parallel to North Main Street and then under East Main Street, picking up stormwater along the way before being dumped into the Millers River.
“That culvert collapsed at some point, underground,” Fortier told Selectboard members. “It looks like it failed and they Mickey Mouse’d it at some time in previous decades. So what essentially was happening was the water from the Fall Brook was pouring into the deteriorating sewer pipe under East Main Street and going into your Wastewater Treatment Plant and getting treated.”
Water from storms and elevated groundwater tables entering sanitary and sewer systems is known as infiltration and inflow.
Fortier said an engineer told him the culvert’s water flow is at least 20,000 gallons per day, and often much more.
The culvert must now be repaired and the town has declared an emergency to obtain Chapter 90 money, which is state funding for cities and towns to repair and improve local roads, bridges, sidewalks and bike paths. Fortier said a temporary fix is being conducted while other funding gets locked down.