Kevin Lanan and his then nine-month pregnant wife Sara woke up early one morning last August to the sound of water rushing by their house on Garret Street.
The Florida Raw Water Pipeline, which delivers most of the city’s drinking water, burst Aug. 9 under Bruce Campbell’s driveway on Timberline Road. The fracture poured hundreds of thousands of gallons of water downward through Jay Harrison’s backyard and down the side of Lanan’s house, causing about $50,000 in damages.
The lawyer for Harrison and Lanan claim the city was negligent and is responsible to fix the property damage. However, the city’s insurance company, Colorado Intergovernmental Risk Sharing Agency, said the city is not liable.
Lanan panicked seeing the water shortly after midnight that night, he said, worried the house full of kids and out-of-town friends would fall over in the gushing flow.
“I told the kids ‘Get ready to leave if we have to leave’ because I had never seen a water flow that big through a residential yard,” he said.
Campbell’s driveway and landscape were also damaged.
Harrison was in Denver that night, but his property sustained the most damage, including destroying a stone retaining wall, erosion to landscaping and large deposits of silt and rocks. Lanan’s driveway was undermined by water and had erosion and silt and rock deposits.
In the summer, the pipe can move about 5 million gallons a day from the Florida River to the city reservoir, said Steve Salka, Durango utilities director.
“It’s a marvel of engineering,” he said. “It’s hydrologically engineered to move the water uphill.”
The pipe runs about 9½ miles and can range from 15 inches to 18 inches in size, depending on the elevation. Lanan, a civil engineer for an oil company, said it took the utilities crew about six hours to shut down the water after the break, which was estimated to have pumped about 4,000 gallons a minute into Harrison’s backyard.
City workers replaced about a 20-foot piece of the pipe. One of several pictures Lanan took of the rupture and the pipe replacement the next day shows a pipe with a 1929 manufacturer’s stamp. It is unclear when the pipe was actually installed, which could have been as much as 32 years after it was made.
“One of the things we’re most worried about at this point is this sort of rupture happening during the day,” Harrison said. “Imagine a 4-year-old or a 3-year-old, as my son was at that time, if he’s playing in the backyard – 4,000 gallons of flow per minute hits him, he could drown.”
Salka said it’s unclear what caused the fracture last summer, saying there was trash stored on top of the pipe. Lanan said he believes the city should have originally laid the pipe on sand instead of bedrock, which could have worn down the pipe.
Campbell, Lanan and Harrison filed claims in August with the city’s insurance company but were denied by CIRSA in early October.
“Our investigation shows there is no liability or negligence on the city of Durango or its employees,” the letter said.
Jeffrey Kane, lawyer for Lanan and Harrison, said in a January letter to City Attorney David Smith that city officials had told his clients that there had been “recurring failures at locations along the pipeline earlier that summer.”
Mayor Dick White responded earlier this week to an email from Harrison about the property damage. It said there were additional circumstances to the event not included in Kane’s letter.
“Settlement or trial of the issue awaits fact-finding concerning all the circumstances around the August event,” White wrote.
Campbell has not hired a lawyer, saying he believes the city will pay for his repairs.
“I’m fully expecting the city to step up and do what’s right,” he said.
smueller@durangoherald.com
