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Stubborn leak floods site of Irving’s newest library, baffling city

Profile image for Avi Selk
Avi Selk

When Irving’s newest library is built, it will boast geothermal wells, auto-tinting windows and enough books to fill a football field.

But now, the South Irving Library is a construction pit.

And for most of the last two months, it’s been a conspicuously quiet pit — with a pool of water at the bottom, weeds sprouting on the rim and no workers in sight.

Casey Tate oversees the project from City Hall across the street. Last week he visited the aging Central Library, which the new building will replace, to tell library board members how an underground stream of unknown origins has stalled construction and baffled his staff.

Work on the library stopped this summer when crews digging out the basement hit water. It flooded the bottom of the pit, bogging down machinery and sending the contractor complaining to City Hall.

The city had planned on some groundwater. Planners designed the library’s basement, which is meant mostly for book storage, with waterproof seals and sump pumps.

But the contractor reported five times as much water as the city’s tests had predicted.

“It sounded like it was an underground river,” Tate told the Irving Public Library Board last week.

He wasn’t kidding. City staff even scoured satellite photos for signs that a creek might once have wound through the construction site, but found none.

A more obvious suspect was a broken water main. City crews located one next to the site, but the pit didn’t dry out after they fixed it.

Next, Tate turned his eye to the pond next door in Centennial Park. Perhaps it was seeping under the soil.

“We lowered the pond and the water in the hole got deeper,” he told the board.

So the city switched off nearby Millennium Fountain for a week and a half, hoping that might dry things out. But the fountain in the pit kept spewing forth.

City staff went so far as to analyze the water’s chemistry to track its source, but still have no solid leads.

Tate wonders if the contractor exaggerated the problem. When city workers retested the water flow at the site, he said, they found it no greater than in their initial tests.

Tate wants to hire an independent firm to find out how much water he’s really dealing with, but he’s having trouble finding one.

At one point he considered simply eliminating the basement. But when he asked the contractor how much money this would save on the $9.7 million project, he found out it would actually cost more.

Instead, the contractor proposed what Tate now considers his worst-case solution: encase the entire basement in a waterproof slurry wall of the same material gas drillers use.

That would add about a quarter million dollars to the project, whose opening date has already slipped past May 2014 and into next summer.

Tate hopes to avoid it. Meanwhile, the city is still chasing leads upstream.

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