“By the Way, That Pipe Is About to Burst.”

IT’S USUALLY WORTHWHILE for a facilities manager to be on hand while a licensed contractor is working on the premises (or even just evaluating a bid request). Often such a vendor will point out something important that had previously escaped our notice.

Which is what happened last week, when a plumber came to deal with a clogged toilet, and I stopped by to check in.… 

In the process of unclogging the toilet, the plumber needed to turn off the water supply to the school/office building. (Yes, you’re right, that’s not normally necessary for unclogging a toilet. However, Mishkon’s plumbing set-up is not yet at the point where it could be labeled normal. But we’ll get there — perhaps with your help!)

That’s when he saw the state of our water supply pipe. And so, as part of his wanting to help us nurse our venerable buildings, he pointed it out to me when I showed up. 

“By the way,” he said, “that pipe is about to burst.”

You can see the heavy corrosion (rust) on this piece of galvanized pipe as it emerges from underground. It brings water from the meter that’s buried in the sidewalk, carrying it in to Mishkon’s school/office building. Presumably that pipe is original (i.e., at least 61 years old). I say that because at about the same time that our building was constructed, plumbing codes were switching over to require copper supply pipes (which last longer).

This pipe and its valve are visible from the street, just south of the main door to our office/school building. Here’s a wider-angle shot that shows the water pipe amid the gas pipes and the bushes, underneath the red earthquake valve.

Vicinity of water supply pipe.

How urgently should this pipe be replaced? I posed this question to our member Barry Steinberg, a plumber (who specializes in new commercial construction). With his usual flair for understatement, he remarked (via text),

It looks like the water service from the meter to the building needs to be replaced sooner rather than later. If it is not leaking, one can only guess how much longer it will last. It could last a day, or 5 years.

Indeed, although the useful life of galvanized pipe is normally said to be 40–50 years, I’ve read that it occasionally lasts more than 60 years — which is evidently our situation. From an engineering perspective, its lifetime depends upon the thickness of its galvanized coating (which we don’t know); and there are many other factors to consider, as well:

The main factors that dictate the corrosivity of the soil are moisture content, pH level, and chlorides. These soil conditions are affected by additional characteristics such as aeration, temperature, resistivity, and texture or particle size.

That is, galvanized pipe tends to last longer in sandy soil like we have in Venice, but shorter in wet soil — such as is caused by the regular watering of our bushes, or by the dripping of water from the apparently worn-out valve packing. 

So why not just wait until it springs a leak? Given that we can’t necessarily make that leak occur while the staff is on hand to see it and a plumber happens to be nearby, I can think of three reasons for being proactive:

1. A flood could easily make a mess that is more costly to clean up.
2. We don’t want to waste drinkable water in a time of drought.
3. The inside of that pipe is probably badly corroded, too; this means that rust particles are being sent downstream that are shortening the life of the plumbing fixtures inside our building.

I have asked two plumbers for a bid to replace this pipe.