Steam Pipe Leak Found At The Middle School

By Martha Coville

On January 15, Gino Faiella, the school district’s superintendent of building and grounds, announced that he had found the leak in a steam pipe at Newtown Middle School. The underground pipe has been leaking since mid-November, costing the district about a $100 a day in fuel. The broken pipe also made classrooms on the school’s ground floor uncomfortable. Some were surprisingly hot, others intemperately warm. The leak posed no danger to students or staff.

Mr Faiella said that his crew had made three separate “digs” to find the leak. He said they used an infrared optical device, which showed them the exact location of the buried leak. The rest, however, was guess work. The pipe runs parallel to the building, near the parking lot. Some parts of it are buried under the paved lot, others run under the building. “We got lucky there,” Mr Faiella said. “It was on a grassy area.”

Mr Faiella said he immediately made “an emergency call” to a mechanical contractor, who put a new casing on the pipe, stopping the leak. “As far was we know,” Mr Faiella said, “that’s the only leak. I’m assuming that since the boiler is holding pressure that it’s the only leak.”

He also said that the patch job was only a short term solution, or “Band-Aid fix.” School district business manager Ron Bienkowski said that the repair cost is approximately $50,000, but that he did not know the exact cost “because the invoices haven’t come in yet.”

Mr Faiella estimated that the pipe was about 20 years old. “If you saw the condition of the pipe,” he said, it would be easy to understand why it was leaking. He said that the problem might have been due to the age of the pipe, or else to water corrosion on the its outer casing.

Mr Bienkowski said the district has hired engineers to examine long-term solutions. They might include laying a new pipe where the present pipe runs, or running a replacement inside the building. He also that the Board of Education has added $850,000 to next year’s middle school Capital Improvement Plan to cover the cost of a long-term solution.