Due to a leaky pipe, a large metropolitan city was losing 12,000 gallons of treated, drinkable water every single day. A fix was needed, and fast. Two other contractors, both previous customers of Miller Pipeline, were called in by the city to rectify the problem.

The leak, which presented as a constant geyser visible on the surface to passersby, turned out to be more than just a typical leak.

The city’s water department provides water services to more than one million people over a 650-square-mile area. “Dewatering the pipe to make repairs was not an option. The demand was too high,” WEKO-SEAL Specialist Ryan Cooper said. Shutting down the service line to repair the hole with concrete was time-intensive, expensive, and would have required the city issuing a formal notice to customers that they would be out of water for an undetermined amount of time. Whatever the fix was, it would have to be installed underwater and under pressure.

One of the contractors, a diving company, remembered their previous encounters with WEKO-SEALs and suggested it as a solution. Cooper was dispatched and when he arrived on site he expected to find a leaking 60” pipe as previously diagnosed by the other contractors. Instead what he discovered was not a faulty 60” pipe near the geyser, but a deeper problem: a leaking 84” pipe farther down the line, part of the city’s critical water infrastructure. Cooper alerted the WEKO-SEAL team in Indianapolis of the change and two 84” seals were immediately manufactured and shipped. The new fix was on site and ready to be installed within 24 hours of the diameter change, which saved the customer money.

Thankfully for residents, even this leak was no challenge for WEKO-SEAL, Miller’s proprietary internal joint seal.

Cooper spent time training divers on how to properly install the seal, and the fix was made in a fraction of the time shutting services down would have taken and with immediate results. “It was beautiful, you could watch the geyser go down in a matter of minutes,” Cooper said.

Because the leak was of treated, sellable water, the divers had to undergo a rigorous decontamination process before and after the diving. Cooper monitored the divers’ activity via CCTV on land. Over the hole in the pipe, divers layered 6” eighteen-gauge stainless steel backing plates to provide strength underneath where the WEKO-SEAL would be applied. Then, they took two double-wide seals and staggered them over the hole, providing maximum protection against future leaks.