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This series of photos shows the deterioration and repair attempts at a stormwater discharge area at Fourth Street and Industrial Avenue on the western edge of downtown Sand Springs.

This series of photos shows the deterioration and repair attempts at a stormwater discharge area at Fourth Street and Industrial Avenue on the western edge of downtown Sand Springs.

This series of photos shows the deterioration and repair attempts at a stormwater discharge area at Fourth Street and Industrial Avenue on the western edge of downtown Sand Springs.

This series of photos shows the deterioration and repair attempts at a stormwater discharge area at Fourth Street and Industrial Avenue on the western edge of downtown Sand Springs.

This series of photos shows the deterioration and repair attempts at a stormwater discharge area at Fourth Street and Industrial Avenue on the western edge of downtown Sand Springs.

This series of photos shows the deterioration and repair attempts at a stormwater discharge area at Fourth Street and Industrial Avenue on the western edge of downtown Sand Springs.

To keep the story simple, we could just say the city has a broken pipe that’s causing problems.

The truth is quite a bit more complicated, though.

About a year ago, City Manager Mike Carter said, a police officer patrolling near Fourth Street and Industrial Avenue on the western edge of downtown noticed what appeared to be a large sinkhole.

“It looked like someone had tried to take some trees down and declutter the area” near the creekbed adjacent to the headwall, he said. “We think that allowed erosion.”

The erosion destabilized a very large stormwater pipe that discharges into a drainage ditch there.

Carter said the pipe carries about half of all the stormwater for the city on the north side of the river.

“Everything from McKinley to Industrial from 13th Street to Fourth Street drains here,” he said. “Every bit of that goes into one large pipe at some point and into that basin.”

Although Industrial is the city limit, the city owns the stormwater structure on the northwest corner of Fourth and Industrial, and after the sinkhole formed, the city bought the vacant property to eliminate concerns about access for repairs and maintenance.

The city also worked with Tulsa County to close Fourth between Industrial and Walnut avenues, Carter said.

“Everybody’s safety is the paramount thing,” he said.

Carter said the pipe’s failure had broken the headwall — the concrete structure that holds the pipe in place and typically helps prevent such erosion.

“We knew it was going to have to be replaced,” he said, adding that, in the meantime, the area presented a potentially serious hazard.

“It would probably trap anyone who got down there during a rainstorm, so we sent it to the engineers.”

Here’s where the story should discuss what was done to rectify the situation and talk about the successful completion.

Instead, this is a story of further complications and headaches.

The pipe in question is deceptively large; an adult can stand inside it. Such pipes aren’t available at the local hardware store, and supply-chain problems meant no pipe that size was going to be available for a while, Carter said.

In the meantime, a heavy rainstorm collapsed more of the hill being formed by the erosion, further adding to the hazard potential. The city used some of its federal ARPA funds for a stopgap.

ARPA, the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, a $1.9 trillion economic stimulus bill, specifically allows municipalities to invest in water, sewer and broadband infrastructure projects.

But then, Carter said, “another big rain came and blew that apart and collapsed more of the hill.”

So the city called in another contractor, who brought in and installed a 12-inch H-frame steel structure to keep the pipe from slipping and grouted the pipe sections back together.

Incredibly, another big storm broke the pipe apart and bent the steel H-frame structure.

“That just tells you the force of that water,” Carter said.

When that failed, the city called back the original contractor, who was finally able to acquire the large pipe.

“He’s been able to chain it down and flowfill it,” Carter said.

“We checked this morning, and it performed spectacularly,” he said last Tuesday afternoon, after at least a couple of days of pretty steady rain.

“Now we’re waiting for the contractor to be able to go down and install the new headwall.”

All’s well that ends well, right? Not quite.

“Now we’re back to square one,” Carter said. “We’re back to where we started, if you will.”

Now that further erosion and damage have been stalled, crews will begin to work to stabilize the area and make it safe for any humans who might be in the area.

“It’s been a very trying time with it because you’re fighting Mother Nature and water,” Carter said. “Man thinks we’re powerful, but water is the most powerful thing.

“This was just four extraordinary rains that just kept compounding on itself.”

The situation was further complicated by the soil makeup in the area.

“On the north side, we have a lot of sandy soil,” Carter said. “A real hard rainstorm can almost liquefy it.”

And then there’s the stormwater drainage structure itself.

“We think this is a very old structure,” he said. “We don’t know when it was installed — definitely more than 50 years ago, but maybe much older than that.”

The city has spent about $239,000 for emergency repairs and will spend approximately $289,000 more on the original project, having used an emergency declaration to get much of the work so far completed on an urgent basis.

Such a declaration empowers the city manager — Carter — to sign contracts and waive bidding requirements to get work done in a timely manner without having to wait for City Council input.

But city policy also dictates that the city manager must inform councilors of the actions taken at their next meeting.

Carter has been reporting regularly to the council about the “Fourth and Industrial” situation for several months, including at the council’s regular monthly meeting on May 23.

Besides telling councilors what was happening, he showed a series of photographs that make the size of the problem more apparent.

“We wanted to show pictures so that everybody understands the gravity of it,” Carter said. “Most people are just going to say a pipe broke, and that’s true.

“But what we’re trying to get across here is the scope and the magnitude of this.”

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This series of photos shows the deterioration and repair attempts at a stormwater discharge area at Fourth Street and Industrial Avenue on the western edge of downtown Sand Springs.

This series of photos shows the deterioration and repair attempts at a stormwater discharge area at Fourth Street and Industrial Avenue on the western edge of downtown Sand Springs.

This series of photos shows the deterioration and repair attempts at a stormwater discharge area at Fourth Street and Industrial Avenue on the western edge of downtown Sand Springs.

This series of photos shows the deterioration and repair attempts at a stormwater discharge area at Fourth Street and Industrial Avenue on the western edge of downtown Sand Springs.

This series of photos shows the deterioration and repair attempts at a stormwater discharge area at Fourth Street and Industrial Avenue on the western edge of downtown Sand Springs.

This series of photos shows the deterioration and repair attempts at a stormwater discharge area at Fourth Street and Industrial Avenue on the western edge of downtown Sand Springs.

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