Right before the winter holidays in 2019, before COVID-19 entered the picture in the U.S., RCAP received a distress call from the small town of Davy, located in southern West Virginia, right in the heart of the Appalachians. Their water system has a customer base of 170 and the distribution system is 12 miles of a variety of piping, with very few valves and hydrants. The system had six households without water and another six with minimal pressure. The dedicated and devoted staff of two for the town was delivering water to the customers every day, sometimes twice a day, throughout the outage. The system has “old school” devices called geophones, for leak detection, and they were listening everywhere, in hopes of a Christmas miracle. Unfortunately, they kept coming up dry. Just before the outage began, a private company had performed a separate infrastructure project that ran along three miles of the system without any notice to the town. The town had already repaired a break caused by this project, however this new leak just so happened to be in the same three-mile stretch.

The first obstacle was that they had already canvassed the area in question with no result in their leak detection efforts. The second obstacle was that the town has a limited supply of repair parts and money. RCAP and town staff walked and listened to every foot of line with no luck and no noise present. On the second day, the team located a valve, some pipe, and clamps to split the three-mile area in half by installing a shut off valve. They were able to acquire some spare parts from the neighboring system that was eight miles away. After the installation of the valve, the team determined the leak was on the latter half, which was good news for the six customers with low pressure – they were now back to full water pressure.

After three days, the team decided to dig up several guard rail posts past the newly installed valve to get an idea of the proximity of the posts to the water line and to get a direct point for noise using RCAP’s leak detector. As the crew was digging up the mainline, RCAP took one last stroll down the road with the leak detector, but still didn’t hear any noise. However, as the TAP walked back up the hill towards the crew, he got a whiff of chlorine in the air! RCAP had the crew move down to this location and dug up the mainline to find the leak. A guard rail post had severed the three-inch water pipe in half. It had pushed the lower half of the pipe down 12 inches below the other section of the pipe which explained why there was no noise during the search. The repairs were made using parts borrowed from the same neighboring system – the City of Welch. The residents had safe drinking water just in time for the holidays thanks to the efforts and collaboration of RCAP, the Town of Davy, and the nearby City of Welch. This is a great example of informal regional collaboration, or regionalization.