Fort Lauderdale is finally recovering $400,000 spent repairing a massive water pipe it didn’t break.
A subcontractor for Florida Power & Light drilled a hole into the city’s main water supply line close to five years ago, leaving tens of thousands of residents without water along with hundreds of businesses.
Faucets stopped flowing and toilets stopped flushing, forcing hundreds of businesses to close that day, on July 17, 2019.
The crippling outage affected not only Fort Lauderdale but water customers in other cities, including all or parts of Davie, Lauderdale-by-the-Sea, Port Everglades, Oakland Park, Sea Ranch Lakes, Tamarac and Wilton Manors –— close to 250,000 customers.
Fort Lauderdale sued FPL and its subcontractors in July 2020, seeking to recoup up to $800,000 spent on repairs and staff time. On Tuesday night, city commissioners gave unanimous approval to a $400,000 settlement.
“The actual repair costs were close to $400,000,” Commissioner Steve Glassman said Wednesday. “We recouped our actual out-of-pocket costs.”
The colossal goof forced hundreds of businesses to close and led to a boil-water order that lasted for days.
Hotels and restaurants in downtown Fort Lauderdale and beyond were among 9,000 businesses impacted by the crisis.
In December 2021, businesses represented by high-profile attorney Bill Scherer won a class-action lawsuit against FPL and three subcontractors.
The jury found that FPL and its subcontractors shared in 98% of the blame while the city was responsible for just 2%.
Fort Lauderdale’s total loss came to $797,000, commissioners were told Tuesday night.
That included $363,000 in pay for emergency personnel who responded to the crisis; $373,000 in costs to repair the lines; and $61,000 for portable toilets and water distribution.
Mayor Dean Trantalis remembers the day well.
“We had a press conference that morning and again that afternoon,” he said. “Everyone lost water for that day.”
Without water or working toilets, restaurants, hotels and malls closed. So did the courthouse. Residents, told to buy bottled water or boil it from the tap, were under a boil-water order for nearly a week.
Here’s what happened that day.
A three-man crew started work around 11 a.m. on July 17, 2019, digging a trench for an underground pipe near Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport. Sometime after 3 p.m. their drill punched a hole in a massive concrete pipe that carries water from the city’s wellfields to its Fiveash Water Treatment Plant.
Water came surging up from the ground.
The crew did not use ground penetrating radar. If they had, they would have found the pipe.
To plug the hole, city crews used a tree stump as a cork. The log and pipe were then encased in concrete, buying the city time to make repairs.
But the incident exposed the fact that Fort Lauderdale had failed to keep up-to-date maps of the pipes and valves that control the flow of water from the wellfields to the treatment plant.
During the crisis, workers had trouble finding a key underground valve because its above-ground marker was missing. Crews finally found it using sonar equipment.
Once crews found the control valve, they discovered it didn’t function properly. That meant the broken pipe could not be sealed off so water could be diverted to the backup pipe.
The city was forced to shut off pumps from the wellfield, leaving all of its customers with only the water left in the pipes.
With the pipes running dry, the mayor declared a state of emergency.
Hundreds of hotels, restaurants and other businesses from Fort Lauderdale to Tamarac were forced to close. The next morning, thousands of people woke up to a boil-water order that lasted for nearly a week.
Several hotels, including the Riverside, were forced to evacuate guests and cancel reservations.
Harbor Beach Marriott estimated it lost $300,000 from the whole ordeal.
“It was like a hurricane,” Scherer said at the time. “Everybody went home and bunkered down for a day.”
Susannah Bryan can be reached at sbryan@sunsentinel.com. Follow me on X @Susannah_Bryan