The Lake Oswego City Council held a special meeting on August 26, 2026, to consider approval of a contract for emergency repairs following a water main failure on Del Prado Street. Public Works Director Eric Caruni and Assistant City Engineer Arush Navani presented an overview of the incident and the proposed work.
Okay, this uh good afternoon. This Thursday, August 27th, 2026 uh meeting of the Lake Osego City Council is now called to order. Ms. Hawkins, please call the role. Air Buck. Here. Councillors Wenlin. Here. Verdict. Here. Corrigan. Here. Edmund Smans. Here. Counselor Afkin is excused. And Councilor Mabu. Yeah. Thank you very much. Well, we've called this special meeting just for one purpose, and that is to consider the approval of a contract to handle the repairs on the recent Del Prado Street water main failure. We have our public works uh director and city uh engineer Eric Caruni here and assistant city engineer Arush Navani, and we appreciate you being here to talk to us about uh the contract. Great. Thank you, Council and Mayor, for taking the time out of your summer evening to have this meeting because it is critical for us in order to keep moving on this project. Um we really appreciate your time this evening. We'll try to keep it brief, but we thought we'd also give you an update a little bit about what happened, kind of a recap of that and and where we're headed in the next several weeks. Um before I do that, though, uh I just do want to say it's going well, if something like this can. It is actually going really well with our uh collaborative approach with all of our different teams out at maintenance with our engineering team and our inspectors all stepping up and making this the priority of the week for the public works department, and it's gone well, and I'm very proud of the accomplishments we've made and the collaboration that we're uh going to have, hopefully, with this with this contractor. With that, I'll turn it over to Mort, who's going to give us um a brief overview of the situation. Thank you, Erica. Uh thank you, Mayor and the counselors. I would also like to thank you for making this a special meeting on a short notice. I would also like to thank the city manager's office and our legal team because they work magic that we were able to uh get this meeting together and the contract thereafter in less than 48 hours. So, with that, I would like to share with you uh what we are facing with and what we are doing and what we have done so far. And so the event at uh last Friday night around um 11 o'clock. Uh we had a 12-inch uh cast iron pipe in Del Prado Street uh failed. And the pipe was installed back in 1971 to give you a little bit of uh the context of the age of the facility that failed. And then immediately our public works and the fire department and the police department responded uh to the emergency and our public works crews uh shut down a 12-inch main. Uh, just to give you a little bit of an idea, it's not an easy task to shut down the 12-inch main that has over 100 PSI of pressure in it. So it's not like uh sort of a kitchen faucet, if you will. Yeah, we were losing you know several thousand gallons of water a minute. So that takes some time. Um and then once we secured the site, we contacted the tourney um excavation uh contractors, and they responded immediately in the middle of the night, and we were able to actually complete the repair by seven o'clock in the morning. Except there are several other steps you have to take after the pipe is sick. You have to flush the line, you have to disinfect it, you have to test it. Uh so the service came online around one o'clock Saturday afternoon. It's still extremely responsive and quick. Uh, because of the amount of water we have lost, and some limited areas have lost basic pressure. It's it's uh normal standard or procedure that you issue a limited boil water notice until you repressurize the system and also take the necessary test, which is basically bacteriological testing. That we did that immediately, and then we could leave the boil water Sunday afternoon at two o'clock. Just to give you an idea, the impacted area is Del Prado, and the break was right around here, but the force of water actually have damaged significantly all the pavement along the way, if you will. And I have some pictures I'll show with you to see what water can do.