John LoBello walks the city streets with a high-tech microphone, and if he hears anything, it’s bad news.
He’s one of a cadre of city workers who prevent water main breaks by going around town listening for the sound of water flowing underground.
LoBello clearly heard rushing water beneath East 53rd Street this morning, and his trained ears interpreted the noise: “This is a small leak.”
He lowered microphones into two valves on the street, and a handheld computer compared sounds from the two points to figure the leak’s exact location. “I chase the leak until I get on top of it,” LoBello said.
The city Department of Environmental Protection gave the property owner responsible three days to fix the problem.
Despite scans with high-tech listening devices and the eyes and ears of 311 callers who report even the most minor leaks, the city is sometimes caught by surprise.
Last December, a city crew put its high-tech ears to the water main beneath Jerome Avenue in the Bronx that blew open last week, creating a giant crater in the street.
They didn’t hear anything from the 108-year-old pipe in the routine inspection. “If it’s quiet, it’s no problem,” LoBello said.
“Most of the time, failures like the one on Jerome are instantaneous events. It’s not something you would have been able to pick up,” said James Roberts, a DEP deputy commissioner.
But the difficulty of finding problems in buried pipes doesn’t stop the city from looking. “We do programmatic leak detection, proactively looking for leaks in the system, borough by borough,” Roberts said.
The city listens to about 60 percent of its 7,000 miles of mains each year. Last year, those searches found 140 leaky city mains and 155 leaks in privately owned water pipes that connect mains to buildings. Sixty-six leaks were found to be the shared responsibility of the city and property owners.
Another 4,198 leaks were reported last year over 311, DEP says. Most of those were also building owners’ responsibility.
Besides listening for leaks, the city monitors water pressure at valve stations where deep-underground tunnels that bring water in from upstate reservoirs meet up with the mains just below street-level.
The Post got an exclusive look at one of the Manhattan valve stations, where recording gauges track water main pressure.
The system recorded a steep plunge in water pressure in part of the Bronx when the Jerome Avenue main blew. While pressure monitoring sometimes shows leaks before they’re obvious, the city heard of the Jerome Avenue break from eyewitnesses.
Though the Bronx gusher made a big mess, the city’s system is redundant enough that water service in the neighborhood was quickly brought to normal.
“Nobody was out of water,” said Roberts. “By the end of this week, you won’t know it happened.”