The Water Street sewer project caused a minor inconvenience for an area hotel earlier this month.

The Tides Inn and Suites on Water Street in Port Townsend experienced some flooding in half a dozen of its rooms on April 8 but according to the management, it only displaced one guest and left no permanent damage.

Geoffery D’Onofrio, general manager of the Tides Inn, disputed rumors of raw sewage in the rooms, saying three rooms experienced grout overflow, while three other rooms experienced only water overflow.

D’Onofrio told The Leader on April 21 the issue was resolved. He credited the city of Port Townsend and its contractor, ACI Construction, for their swift response.

“They were here that same day, and stayed well past midnight to get it fixed,” D’Onofrio said. “They did have to dig into the pavement of our parking lot to get at the pipes, but everyone’s response was superb, and it mitigated what could have been a lot worse.”

When asked if the Tides In had filed an insurance claim, D’Onofrio said he was not at liberty to discuss that.

Steve King, director of public works for the city of Port Townsend, chalked up the Tides Inn’s room flooding to the city’s Water Street sewer replacement project, and agreed with D’Onofrio that ACI and project manager Andre Harper’s “quick work” resolved the problem in short order.

“The flooding of the Tides Inn rooms resulted during the process of pumping cellular (light weight) grout into the old sewer pipe, to fill the void between the existing old 14-inch pipe, and the new 8-inch HPDE (high-density polyethylene) pipe,” King said. “These types of projects are designed to fill up voids under the street, to prevent a future sinkhole.”

King explained that, before pumping concrete into the void space within the old sewer pipe, the construction crews had to disconnect the old sewer’s lateral connections to various buildings along Water Street, and reconnect them to the new pipe.

“Unfortunately, there were two laterals that were undetected, and not shown on our city asset drawings,” King said. “These laterals were to the older buildings in the Tides Inn campus. The newer building connection to the sewer was identified, and connected to the new pipe, so this event only impacted the older buildings.”

According to King, neither the city crews nor the contractor knew that these older sewer connections were in existence, “given we found the connection to the newer building, and thought they were all tied together.”

King cited this incident as an example of why the city’s records drawings are so important. “Often, the older infrastructure in town was not well-recorded in our records,” said King. He added that this project was further complicated because the contractor couldn’t run a sewer camera into the old pipe. That help’s to identify any sewer connections that might not have been included in the city asset records, due to the risk of the pipe collapsing.

“The pipe was so fragile that merely touching it caused it to start to disintegrate,” King said.

Given the two laterals were not connected to the new pipe, when grout was pumped into the old pipe, the grout traveled up the sewer lateral connection to the Tides Inn building, and came up through the toilets and drains in the hotel rooms.

“As soon as the problem was detected, the ACI crews and city engineering department went to work to clear the grout and clean the rooms,” King said. “The crews worked well into the night and the following day.”

King praised D/Onofrio and the Tides In staff for managing to restore those rooms and make them ready for service by that weekend.

“We are super thankful for the work of the contractor, our engineering staff and the Tides Inn in helping turn this mess around with a quick response,” King said.

“In hindsight, more research may or may have not revealed the laterals,” he said, noting it was already “a precarious project, given that we’d already experienced two collapses.” They have been “quite concerned” about additional collapses.

The silver lining is that it happened at this point in the process. “If we’d discovered this problem later, it would have been more disruptive,” and costly, particularly if it had happened during the busy season or after the project was complete.

King looks forward to its completion. “We no longer have to worry about the old sewer trunk line collapsing, and jeopardizing sewer service to Downtown, and most of Uptown.” He anticipates it will be done “well in advance” of this year’s Rhododendron Festival which starts May 14.