Water main break floods steam tunnels, Plant Bioscience building

Around 5:45 p.m. on Thurs. Oct. 27 was when operators at the City of Bozeman Sourdough water treatment plant noticed something alarming: water levels in the Kenyon drive and Sourdough water reservoir tanks had fallen nearly two feet.

“It was indicative of a leak, several thousand gallons per minute,” said John Alston, director of utilities for the City of Bozeman.

Water is distributed throughout Bozeman by a network of high-pressure buried pipes called water mains. Typically, when a water main breaks, city workers are alerted by a small geyser visibly erupting in the street. Instead, Alston described a chaotic evening as six water department operators roamed the town, searching for the leak in vain.

Much to their confusion, an estimated 750,000 gallons of water were nowhere to be found. Stranger yet, no one had called in to report a flooded street.

Unfortunately for the water department, there is one place in town where almost a million gallons of water can go unnoticed: the MSU steam tunnels.

The two-mile-long tunnel network underneath campus connects many of MSU’s facilities to centralized heat according to the MSU Office of Engineering and Utilities website. Heat comes courtesy of the natural-gas fired steam plant on the northeast corner of campus.

“One of our superintendents came up 11th and noticed water coming from one of the hatches to the tunnels. So that story got put together very quickly,” said Alston.

Alston was informed around 8 p.m.that the water main break had occurred within the construction site of the new Student Wellness Center, he said.

According to MSU Spokesperson Mike Becker, the failed water main is still under investigation. The company building the new Student Wellness Center, Jackson Contractor Group , did not respond to requests for comment.

According to an email sent on Oct. 27 by Vice President of Administration and Finance Terry Leist, water flowed downhill through the tunnels until it reached the Plant Bioscience Building.

The Plant Bioscience Building will remain partially closed until further notice, primarily due to humidity and moisture in the mechanical systems, said Becker.

In the meantime, researchers housed in the Plant Bioscience Building will take refuge elsewhere on campus. “As soon as we had limited entry, we took some of the equipment out and moved it to Leon Johnson,” said Mike Giroux, a researcher for the cereal quality laboratory and head of the plant sciences department.

His lab is housed on the first floor of the Plant Bioscience Building, alongside the Malt Quality and Schutter Diagnostic Labs. Fortunately for Giroux, “the impact on samples has not been very large,” he said. “Our frozen samples remained frozen.”

According to Alston, MSU workers isolated the water main and prevented further flooding without city assistance. “They did a good job getting it shut down,” said Alston. “We were definitely talking to several people from the school once they identified [the leak].”

“We're proceeding with safety as the number one priority, which is why we're keeping the building mostly closed to let it dry out,” Becker said.

If you observe a water main break, call the City of Bozeman Public Works department at (406) 582-3200.

Editor's Note: After this story was published, MSU announced that the second and third floors of the Plant Bioscience Building will be reopening on Monday, Nov. 7.