Orange Beach, Ala. – (OBA) – The Orange Beach Water Authority recently wrapped up three big projects including upgrading the waterline through the Sportsplex that will increase service there as well as Orange Beach Middle/High School.

This month the Orange Beach City Council approved an easement for the authority to cross the park and Collegiate Lane to tap into a huge line that runs from Powerline Road to beach road. To start the project, crews tapped into a line on the east side of Lauder Lane.

“We’ve got two water mains that run on both sides of Lauder Lane,” Field Inspector Cody Pierce said. “On the east side we’ve got an eight-inch water main. We tapped into it, ran the trail back to the west and went through the ballpark. Then we went down Collegiate and tapped into our 30-inch main that runs down Powerline Road. Basically, we just looped that 30 into Lauder and then also that eight-inch that we tapped into at the end of Lauder runs to the east and ties into our 20-inch on 161.”

Looping and interconnecting the lines helps keep water flowing if a certain one goes down or needs repairs.

“Just some more redundancy in the system,” Pierce said. “The main that fed the ballpark was an eight-inch PVC water main that’s been in the ground a long time. We took the chance to upgrade that to a 12-inch duck wireline and we looped it, so we have multiple feeds for the school, the ballpark and everybody else in between.”

The part running through the Sportsplex was aging and needed to be replaced, Pierce said.

“We tapped that eight (on Lauder Lane) and came out and right after we made that tap, we upgraded to a 12-inch and went to the west. There are three bores along that trail because of the drainage. There were four bores in that project and the rest was open cut, dug a trench and laid it. Really bored down Collegiate for the most part because of the wetlands and stuff like that.”

Another big project finally in the books is upgrading the lines on the north and south side of Canal Road from The Wharf all the way to the Doc’s Seafood Shack intersection.

“We had an eight-inch main on the north side of Canal Road from that new gas station and upgraded it to a 12-inch main and ran from Cumberland all the way to Luna’s, Pierce said. “On the south side, we went all the way from Powerline Road to Cactus Cantina. There was a 12-inch main in the ground already, but we upgraded it to a 16-inch main.”

That was actually part of the project to widen Canal Road to five lanes and the Alabama Department of Transportation had asked the authority to wait until they were done before upgrading the lines there.

The third project was moving two lines carrying untreated water from wells to the treatment plant on the Intracoastal Waterway just west of where the state is hoping to put a new bridge. Pierce said they got them moved and then a court order halted work on the bridge.