Water main break repaired at Southeast Missouri State

A 14-inch water main that cracked earlier this week under the Southeast Missouri State University campus has been repaired. The job was completed by 8:30 p.m. Wednesday.

The break prompted classes to be canceled and university offices to close. The main and River campuses will remain closed until Tuesday.

Repair crews had to fill, drain and refill a nearby water storage tank after repairing the pipe. They since have gathered water samples and are having them tested.

Results are expected by 11 a.m. today at the earliest, News Bureau Director Ann Hayes said in an email. But Cape Girardeau Public Works director Tim Gramling said the city won't be ready to tell the university the main is operational until sometime today, probably around noon.

Once the break was identified Wednesday, the repair crew connected alternative water main sources to the campus and nearby homes. The water was, and still is, safe, the city stated in a news release Thursday, and water pressure was low but expected resume soon.

After water safety from this particular water main is confirmed by testing, normal operations will resume, meaning it can be reconnected and used by the campus and nearby homes.

Gramling said a section of the cast iron pipe that cracked was replaced with ductile iron, the closest material to the original.

The main was in the middle of the boiler plant yard for the university, which Gramling said was not the best location for a water line. He said the city probably will consider meeting with university officials to see what changes they have planned.

The city has been implementing a 2-inch main replacement program since the early 1990s. Other breaks are something the city deals with as they occur. The past couple of years, the city has seen 60 to 70 breaks.

At the university, residence halls were still open to students, but they were encouraged to leave campus.

"We've actually seen a good majority of our on-campus students leave early to take advantage of an extended holiday weekend due to the water main break," director of Residence Life Kendra Skinner said in an email. "We have many students who are choosing to remain on campus for the football game tonight and are then planning to leave campus for the remainder of the weekend. We anticipate nearly 1,000 students will remain on campus throughout the weekend. That's about one-third the normal on-campus student population."

As far as instructional impact is concerned, provost Bill Eddleman said the water main break probably affected all but about 1,000 of Southeast's 11,580 students. The only ones unaffected are the online-only students and some at the regional campuses.

Eddleman said the disruption means one or two less class meetings for typical classes and may cause instructors to rearrange courses. If courses are blended, part face-to-face and part online, the online component can be used to get around that.

Instructors may not get to cover certain topics as well.

Steven Hoffman, professor of history and coordinator of the Historic Preservation Program, said he lays out what he's going to do every day for the semester, so when a day is missed, curriculum has to be pushed back, or something cut, although that's rare. It may result in doubling up on topics, giving them shorter shrift than desired.

Having this happen at the beginning of the year, though, is better than the last week of class, which would leave no time to squeeze in instruction, Hoffman said.

Eddleman said the main break has impacted the regional campuses, because interactive television courses that originate at the main campus have had to be canceled. If an ITV course originates on a regional campus, it has to be recorded so students taking it on the main campus can access it later.

"The whole thing is more of an irritation than anything else, because it couldn't have been prevented and we just have to deal with it," Eddleman said.