The City of Odessa release the costs to repair the water breakage

ODESSA, Texas (KOSA) -The city of Odessa released that the cost to repair the water line breakage from June, was over $600,000.

That includes city workers and police doing overtime and outside contractors.

Almost two months ago a 25 inch break in one of the water pipes and a faulty valve left the city without water for days.

The city of Odessa has 6 million dollars saved in the budget for the repair and maintenance of the city’s water and sewer lines.

The city spent over $600,000 of that fund in June.

Five hundred and eleven thousand of that went into equipment costs itself.

Seventy-eight thousand went to Rangeline Pipeline Services of Haslet.

Mayor Joven says the most expensive repair was hiring the outside contractor to repair the valve.

“Once we had the failure and we had to bring in the contractor and that took a real big bulk of the cost. Once we were able to isolate that, we were able to do the repairs.” Joven said.

Mayor Joven says one thing the budget for the city’s water and sewer lines doesn’t account for is the loss money that businesses lost.

Since the city was on a boil water notice, most restaurants had to close for days, and mayor joven says he thinks it was in the millions that were lost in those days closed.

“We budget 5 million dollars in our budget to cover situations like this for the city. what is unrecoverable is the loss to businesses because they were closed because of this situation,” Joven said.

Part of the cost also went toward city employees that had to work overtime between city workers, Odessa police, Odessa fire department and more…

The total pay out was just over $32,000.

Mayor Joven says he appreciates the citizens of Odessa for their patience throughout the water break.

He also says that the city is aware of the aging infrastructure under the streets, and the city has a plan to fix those pipes depending on how critical the pipe line is.