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“I get there, and it was chaos.”
Jermaine Toney works overnights as an emergency turner for Louisville Water. He thought he was responding to a routine call in mid-September.
“It came in as a hit hydrant,” Toney recalled. “Somebody hit the hydrant and it was leaking, possibly knocked off the main. I get those all the time, so I’m like ‘okay, maybe it’s not as bad as they think it is’.”
But when Toney arrived, there was some confusion about whether anybody was inside the car. He sprinted into action.
“I got in ‘go mode’ to hurry up and get the water off because I could actually see the car sinking deeper in the hole.”
Toney said, “I knew I had to shut the main down because the hydrant was knocked off, and too much water (was flowing) to get to the gate to see if it was just knocked off the gate valve, so I couldn’t access the gate valve. I had to turn the main off.”
Fortunately, Toney turned off the water quickly, and in the meantime, the fire department broke a window in the vehicle. Toney said the driver had escaped before the car started sinking and made her way across the street.
While Toney has worked for Louisville Water for almost seven years, he’s only been working as an emergency turner for seven months.
“We basically got to know what we’re looking at and how to diagnose the problem and know what you’re going to tell the crews when they come out to fix it, what to look for, and all the different scenarios.”
That night in September is one scenario he won’t soon forget.
Emergency Turner Jesse Jewell said, “That’s literally the life of a turner. It’s something different every day. You think you’ve seen it all, and then the next thing you know- bam, something new surprises you!”
When the remnants of Hurricane Helene barreled into our area on September 27, Jewell was dispatched to a home in St. Matthews late in the afternoon.
“It was simply, ‘hey, this guy’s calling and saying water’s leaking out of his meter and it’s pretty bad. Can you go over there and check it out?’ Yeah, sure.”
Much like Toney, Jewell got quite a surprise.
“You pull up and you’re like, ‘oh, wow’. They were right, it was leaking,” Jewell chuckled.
A huge tree had toppled over onto a car driving down the road. Once Jewell confirmed it was safe for her to cross the downed power lines, she scoured through the tree debris to find the water main to turn off service.
“Even though it was separated, our (Louisville Water’s) side was separated from his (the customer) side, water was still going through the water meter and spraying out the pipe where it was broken,” Jewell explained. She did her best to ease the customer’s mind who was worried about money going down the drain. She noted the circumstances on her work ticket.
“Due to extreme weather-related events, customer might have a high bill due to service line being ripped out of ground from tree,” she documented.
Coincidentally, this was not Jewell’s first encounter with mother nature’s wrath. In March 2023, powerful winds tore through the Shively area.
“The customer said that their meter and everything was exposed due to a tree falling over, and you don’t know what that means until you show up.”
When she got there, there was no mistake about what happened.
“The tree in their front yard literally dumped over and pulled the meter vault.” She thought, “nobody is gonna believe me when I tell them,” and snapped a picture of the homeowners standing next to the giant root ball with the meter hanging out. Her quick thinking also helped keep the meter intact.
“Whenever tree crews cut up the trees, the root balls will literally stand back up. So, all I did was lay the service straight over. They cut the tree up and that root ball fell on top of the (water) service. From where I laid it over, it didn’t damage it (the meter).”
Not every call is as cut and dry. This past July, Jewell had her work cut out for her at Lannan Park in Portland.
“We’re like detectives for water situations. I need to find out what I’ve got going on so I can tell somebody else what needs to be fixed.”
In this case, the first step was locating which gate valve turned off the water that was filling up a meter vault. Her maps weren’t matching what she saw at the scene and the meter lid was overgrown with grass. Through a process of elimination, she figured it out.
“Once I was able to kill the water (service), I pumped the vault out, and I could see that it wasn’t an easy fix I could do myself,” Jewell said.
In what appears to be an attempted metal theft, someone had ripped out the entire meter and damaged the connecting pipe. A crew was assigned to the job and quickly replaced the equipment which is vital to that area. It supplies water to both LG&E and MSD substations, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and the McAlpine Locks and Dam.
“It could’ve been a lot worse than what it was,” said Jewell.
Just another day in the life of an emergency turner at Louisville Water.
“I love it!” Toney shared.
