In Estevan, a temperature fluctuation that brought extreme cold weather led to some challenges for construction crews and infrastructure specialists as the cold weather caused several water main breaks. In surrounding communities, however, the pipes got away relatively unscathed. 

Ask people in towns like Redvers, Carlyle, Carnduff, Stoughton, Arcola, and Midale about the after-effects of cold weather and you'll hear the term "knock-on-wood" an awful lot. As in, "All of our pipes and water mains have held up so far, knock-on-wood." Only Oxbow had any issues with their pipes, and theirs was relatively minor. 

"It's abandoned curb valve that was installed kind of screwy years ago," said Town CAO Lisa Pierce. "It took us some time to locate where the leak was actually coming from. The water moved in an odd pattern. But we've found it now so we're doing the dig and doing the necessary repairs."

That was about the sum of the damage caused by the cold weather. Calls to all of the towns listed above yielded no examples of any water main breaks, so Estevan appears to have gotten a little bit unlucky over the last few weeks. 

According to Pierce, no one lost water for very long in Oxbow as they shut off water intermittently to see which curb valve was causing the problem. It took some time to find it (the valve was located on what is now a single home but had once been three parcels of land), but once they did, they brought things under control quickly. This owes to a lot of work the town has done in years leading up to this one.

"We replaced 29 main valves, 15 hydrant valves, and over 230 curb stops since the beginning of 2019," Pierce said. "Us being able to know where our infrastructure is and do proper maintenance on it has definitely helped us with our operations." 

Temperature fluctuations have been the cause of water main breaks here in Estevan, as the temperature was below minus 40 after being above zero for a stretch. It will be back above zero again this weekend.