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A flood of work tickets doesn’t bother Louisville Water Emergency Turner Jesse Jewell.
“That’s my favorite part of it (the job) because it makes my day fly by,” she said.
So, one might assume she’s had a blast over the last several weeks, while we were stuck in an arctic blast that triggered an onset of water main breaks.
“It was like a cold surge that just shocked our whole system throughout the whole city. We’re just doing what we can to keep as many people ‘in water’ and to fix as many mains as we can as fast as we can,” Jewell said.
Fellow emergency turner Chris Vaughn has had his own long list of tickets to inspect.
“I’ve got alerts on my phone when the water temperature drops below 34 degrees,” he shared. “The magic number is 39. If the water temperature for whatever reason gets to 39, everything breaks loose.”
Turners are usually the first Louisville Water employees dispatched to a location. Their job is to determine the issue and the source of the leak or water main break.
“Identify where the water’s coming from. That’s the number one thing,” Jewell explained.
But sometimes other challenges mean shifting gears, which was the case on January 28 when a pipe burst on Willis Avenue across from Seneca Park.
“That was flooding the road. That was causing a safety issue. For that one, I couldn’t do my job until all of the cars got out of the way,” Jewell said. “My first priority was closing that road down to stop people from driving through that icy water.”
Jewell called in reinforcement; two other emergency turners rushed to the scene to help isolate the area and turn off the valves to shut off water flow where the break happened.
Vaughn, who spends most of his time working during second or third shift, faces different challenges such as staying safe and secure while working in the dark and the most obvious one – no daylight.
“My handy dandy flashlight. That’s the number one tool.”
One of Vaughn’s other favorite tools?
“Google Earth is our best friend when it comes to all this (snow and ice) because we can pull up a picture of when the snow wasn’t there.”
It proved invaluable when he answered a request to locate a meter lid buried under snow.
“We’re gonna go find it. It’s about right at the edge of that bush and the sidewalk. We’ll see how close I am,” Vaughn joked.
He nailed it on the first try! For Vaughn, working outside business hours has its perks.
“Most of the time, the customers are asleep. You can get in, you can do what you need to do, and you can get out. You also don’t have as much traffic. That is probably the biggest bonus of working night shift.”
And he enjoys that every day or night is different.
“I love the turner position because of the ‘never knowing until you get there’ kind of results. You get an ‘examine for a leak’ [ticket from a Louisville Water dispatcher], and you get out there and it’s a 50-foot geyser main break.”
You won’t often see Vaughn getting all worked up on a call. He takes it all in stride and focuses on the job at hand.
“One ticket at a time. I just assess it and figure out what I need to do and do whatever I need to do,” Vaughn said while suggesting that he’d be alright if winter left us sooner than later.
“I called Alaska and told ‘em I was tired of their preview. They can take the northern winds back,” he said with a laugh.
Jewell is also ready to put winter in the rearview mirror.
“All of us are taking on the same workload. Everybody is head down, plowing through it,” she said. “This won’t last forever. The temperatures are going to come up. Everything’s going to settle back down. So, it’s… just ready for summer (sighs).”
