A records request may have uncovered negligence in maintaining the fallen waterline across the Anna Maria Island Bridge on Manatee Avenue.
At the request of Holmes Beach Commissioner Dan Diggins, city engineer Sage Kamiya emailed Manatee County utilities director Evan Pilachowski June 28 for copies of the past 10 years of inspection reports for the pipeline.
However, Pilachowski wrote in a July 6 email response that the county has no inspection records.
“The inspections performed have been visual by in-house personnel on a regular but not defined time interval. No records from those inspections are created that I’m aware of,” Pilachowski wrote.
He added, “Based on the memory of people in the office, repairs to the hangers were identified and performed sometime around the 2007-08 timeframe.”
About 1,000 feet of the bridge’s 16-inch main that feeds water to Anna Maria Island — which was installed in 1982 — fell June 19 into the Anna Maria Sound after support hangers on the underside at the east end of the bridge failed.
The collapse left the 24-inch water main across Cortez Bridge as the sole water source on AMI, resulting in low water pressure and a call from the county for islanders to conserve water during repairs.
Following the pipeline collapse, Diggins, who retired from investigating aircraft accidents, was critical of the county’s infrastructure management.
Diggins said the hangers holding the main had rusted over and an inspection would have determined they needed replacement or reinforcement.
“This was totally preventable,” Diggins said. “This would have been an easy thing to fix. … If they saw the rust over time, they should have done something about it.”
“If they visually inspected and didn’t do anything about it, that’s bad. If they didn’t inspect it, that’s bad,” he added.
The bridge is inspected every three months by the Florida Department of Transportation.
The pipeline is monitored by the county, which inspects all pipe crossings after major storms.
Pilachowski wrote that the county is reassessing its inspection program following the Manatee Avenue waterline collapse.
“Based on our experience in this pipe hanger failure, we will be evaluating a more formal inspection program moving forward for all aerial pipe crossings,” he wrote.
Diggins called for the county to establish a strict inspection regimen to ensure something like this doesn’t happen again.
“Maybe if they spent time maintaining their current infrastructure, instead of building more, perhaps this wouldn’t have happened,” Diggins said. “We can do better than this.”
Water flows, repairs still to come
In the meantime, a new water main is up and running across the bridge.
Manatee County chief utilities engineer Jim Renneberg gave the go-ahead July 6 to activate water services to a newly installed main on the bridge, according to county information outreach manager Bill Logan.
Bradenton-based Woodruff & Sons began repair work June 26 and finished installing a new pipeline on the underside of the AMI Bridge by June 30.
Now that the new main is active, the county is no longer requesting islanders to conserve water.
However, the repairs aren’t finished yet.
Phase 2 of repairs will involve removing the fallen pipeline from Anna Maria Sound and securing new hangers along the bridge to hold the main, which will need to be permanently repositioned as repairs proceed.
That work is expected to require lane closures that were not scheduled as of July 7.
“Details of that work have yet to be finalized,” Logan wrote in a July 6 news release. “Residents and visitors will be notified of any road closures or traffic impacts associated with those activities.”
Maybe the county was more interested in building a parking lot!