Star Tribune
Minneapolis cuts off ‘dead leg’ pipe that tainted one street’s water with orange filth
The tap water serving Jim Hagen and his neighbors on his south Minneapolis street used to turn rusty and orange, staining plumbing fixtures and filling water heater tanks with crud.
The culprit was a “dead leg,” a pipe at the end of a water main that led nowhere. Years of complaints from residents on the street finally prodded the city to disconnect the pipe and end the flow of discolored water a few weeks ago. Now, Hagen wants to ensure the city takes care of the rest of the 400 or so water main dead ends across Minneapolis.
The city regularly meets federal water quality rules and hasn’t detected a contaminant above federal limits at least back to 2019, according to its annual consumer confidence reports. But Hagen said he worries other neighborhoods may have issues similar to those of his street.
“We’re trying to basically change the city policy so that it would catch blocks like ours,” he said.
Hagen, a semiretired professor who focuses on business ethics and systemic inequality, has lived near the intersection of 47th Avenue S. and Dowling Street since 2009. It’s one of the areas in the city where an underground main dead ends and where water might not circulate as often. The longer water doesn’t flow, the more opportunity there is for bacteria to grow.
A corrosive bacteria was the villain in the pipe beneath 47th Avenue, eating away at the century-old cast iron and creating orange residue that sometimes became dislodged. Though the iron deposits could create a mess, they alone didn’t make the water unsafe to drink.
The problem was worse at this location because of the dead leg, the roughly 9-foot segment of pipe that extended underground past the hydrant at the end of the street.
Annika Bankston, director of water treatment and distribution for the city, said the system may have been built with these dead-end pipes in the expectation that development would continue into another block or to avoid a “water hammer,” which occurs when rushing water hits an angle in the pipe with enough force to damage it.
Water systems across the country regularly add extra disinfectant, such as chloramine, to stop dangerous bacteria from sneaking into the system between the treatment plant and homes. It can be a challenge to find the right balance — enough disinfectant to keep water clean, but not so much that chemical byproducts remain.
In Hagen’s neighborhood, the spur at the end of the dead-end main wasn’t just helping iron bacteria thrive. Because it was a fertile area for bacteria, it had become a “sink” that was quickly burning through disinfectant, Bankston said.
Minneapolis had been trying to address the orange water issue for years, first by flushing the hydrant at the end of the street and then by installing a low-flow system to periodically drain the hydrant without stirring up iron residue, Hagen said.
He said it took “a great deal of pestering by the neighbors” to get the city to test the tap water of nearby homes to determine its level of disinfectant.
Data obtained from the city through a public records request revealed that workers had tested for disinfectant a few times in 2019 and 2020. More tests conducted starting in mid-September of this year found the total chlorine levels inside homes was plummeting.
On Sept. 19, water utility officials arrived on the block and separated the extra spur of bacteria-laden main. On Nov. 3, they returned to clean the rest of the water main and line it with concrete to stop rusty water from forming again.
Bankston said the city regularly tests flow rates when it flushes hydrants — an indicator of whether iron deposits have built up and started to block a pipe. She also said 16 miles of underground pipe were cleaned and lined with concrete this year, and the city plans to clean out the same amount next year.
But the priority for that program is making sure each hydrant gets enough flow for fire suppression, Bankston said.
And while the city knows where water mains reach a dead end — some of these areas have already been lined with concrete — it’s less clear how many dead ends include an additional leg, as on Hagen’s street.
It’s also expensive to fix them. The work on 47th Avenue cost almost $33,000, said Matt Croaston, a spokesman for the water utility.
“If I could send everybody out in the next two months and cut off all [the dead legs], I would do it, but that’s part of the challenge of resource management,” Bankston said.
Hagen said he still plans to push the city to do more hydrant flushing and water quality testing. But he and his neighbors, who also pushed city officials to examine the water system, did take time to celebrate their cleaned-up water main.
A few days after the city’s work was done, they gathered in the middle of 47th Avenue — toasting each other with glasses of clear tap water.
ZUMBRO RIVER VALLEY, MINN. – From his combine on an October afternoon, harvesting dried-out soybeans the color of dust, Martin Larsen points to a hillside where his ancestors from Scandinavia homesteaded.
History might be happening again on the Larsen farm.
Last year, on this plot of land along the Zumbro River, the 43-year-old farmer from Byron grew oats. Not oats for hogs or cows. But oats for humans. He hauled the oats to a miller across the state line into Iowa. A previous year, Larsen even had a contract with Oatly, the trendy Swedish maker of milk alternatives.
Something of an oat renaissance has been occurring down in the fields west of the Mississippi River. During winters, Larsen — through his job with the Olmsted County Soil and Water Conservation District — evangelized to fellow farmers on the humble small grain.
His friends and neighbors were listening. As of this fall, over 60 farmers, covering 6,000 acres across southern Minnesota, have joined Larsen’s informal coalition to grow food-grade oats. They call themselves the “oat mafia.”
Star of breakfast food, children’s books and, increasingly, those nondairy lattes, oats are easier on the environment, requiring less nitrogen than corn, which means a lot in the karst-rich hill country of southeastern Minnesota, where the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has tasked state officials with cleaning up drinking water.
“Nitrates come from this,” said Larsen, driving his gray Gleaner combine on a patch of soybeans beneath a hillock just beyond the suburban sprawl of northwest Rochester on a recent warm Friday afternoon. “I’m not going to beat around the bush anymore. That’s what the data says.”
But as the oat mafia looks to the future, they’re struggling with a basic marketing question: Who will actually buy these oats they’re growing?
Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan and her daughter were among the throngs Friday as President Joe Biden delivered the apology that many Indigenous Americans thought would never come.
“I think he really said the things that people have been waiting to hear for generations, acknowledged just the horror and trauma of literally having our children stolen from our communities,” said Flanagan, a member of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe. “It’s a powerful first step towards healing.”
Hundreds of boarding schools operated in the 19th and 20th centuries, separating Indigenous children from their families and forcing them to assimilate to European ways. Many children were abused, and at least 973 died, according to a report from the U.S. Department of the Interior.
Other Minnesotans reacted similarly to Flanagan, saying they welcomed the apology but that additional action is needed to help Indigenous people move forward.
Anton Treuer, a professor of Ojibwe at Bemidji State University, wrote in a newsletter that the apology was “a welcome first step on the journey to healing.”
“There is no way to truly right historical injustices for the children buried at Carlisle, Haskell, and other schools, but these words set a new tone for the country and will help heal the anguish so many Natives have carried for so long,” Treuer wrote. “It gives me hope that we can come together to reconcile and heal our troubled nation.”
Sen. Mary Kunesh, DFL-New Brighton, the first Indigenous woman to serve in the state Senate, called Biden’s apology encouraging.
“This recognition of past wrongdoings is an important step towards healing relationships between the United States and the sovereign nations affected by these past systems,” Kunesh said in a statement. “This dark period of American history must be remembered and taught.”
“I have done everything in my power to remedy this situation, and it continues to get more and more violent by the day,” Moturi wrote. “There have been numerous times when I’ve seen Sawchak outside and contacted law enforcement, and there was no response. I am not confident in the pursuit of Sawchak given that Sawchak attacked me, MPD officers had John detained, and despite an HRO and multiple warrants — they still let him go.”
On Friday, five City Council members sent a letter to Mayor Jacob Frey and Police Chief Brian O’Hara expressing their “utter horror at MPD’s failure to protect a Minneapolis resident from a clear, persistent and amply reported threat posed by his neighbor.”
Council Members Andrea Jenkins, Elliott Payne, Aisha Chughtai, Jason Chavez and Robin Wonsley went on to allege that police had failed to submit reports to the County Attorney’s Office despite threats being made with weapons, and at times while Sawchak screamed racial slurs. Sawchak is white and Moturi is Black.
The council members also contend in their letter that the MPD told the County Attorney’s Office that police did not intend to execute the warrant for “reasons of officer safety.”
At a Friday afternoon news conference at MPD’s Fifth Precinct, O’Hara said police had been working to arrest Sawchak since at least April, but “no Minneapolis police officers have had in-person contact with that suspect since the victim in this case has been calling us.” The chief pointed out that Sawchak is mentally ill, has guns and refuses to cooperate “in the dozens of times that police officers have responded to the residence.”
O’Hara put aside the option to carry out “a high-risk warrant based on these factors [and] the likelihood of an armed, violent confrontation where we may have to use deadly force with the suspect.” The preference, he said, was to arrest Sawchak outside his home, but “in this case, this suspect is a recluse and does not come out of the house.”
