Tampa Bay Water sues over reservoir cracks

Tampa Bay Water's board voted unanimously today to sue the three companies building its $146-million reservoir over cracks that have plagued the facility for the past two years.

"On behalf of the ratepayers and the taxpayers, I want to make sure the cost of repairs is not borne by them," Tampa City Council member Charlie Miranda, a utility board member, said before the vote.

The cracks in the C.W. Bill Young Regional Reservoir first turned up in December 2006, and efforts to repair them have repeatedly failed. After checking a dozen different theories, engineers concluded "filling the reservoir up and draining it -– it's the action of lowering the water level" is what is causing the cracks, Don Polmann, the utility's director of science and engineering, said last week.

Water is getting under the top soil-cement layer of the reservoir wall and instead of draining back into the reservoir, it's producing water pressure under the layer, causing the cracking, Polmann said.

The targets of the utility's legal action: HDR Engineering, which designed the massive reservoir; Barnard Construction Co., which built it; and Construction Dynamics Group, which oversaw the construction. The board also agreed to fire HDR from its job of filing monitoring reports on the reservoir.

The reservoir — the largest in Florida, covering about 1,100 acres — is supposed to hold 15-billion gallons of water for use by customers in Pinellas, Pasco and Hillsborough counties. But for now it contains only 6.5-billion gallons. Tampa Bay Water has kept it half-full as engineers searched for the cause of the cracking.

Craig Pittman, Times staff writer

*