Off the Press is known for its journalistic prowess, so we would be remiss not to pen our perspective on local water situations. A lot of people missed it, but last week on Monday, a big water pipe broke and threw the whole city into chaos. Stevens told everyone they could go home and put classes online to entice them to not pay attention either. They unlocked the emergency porta-potty stash (but didn’t use the entire thing) and told everyone the water needed to be all hot and bubbly for a minute before they could drink it.
But let’s talk about pipes. Due to the unfortunate tendency of water to be a liquid, we can’t just pour it onto the roads and hope it goes where we want it to, so we have to contain it in big long cylinders and pressurize it with pumps or gravity to get it moving. The pressure also serves to keep illegal things like bacteria and weird icky particles out of the water stream. The water in the pipes also doesn’t all move at the same speed, generally water closer to the center moves faster and, due to the no-slip condition, water on the edges doesn’t really move at all. But since the water has all the pressure, it likes to explode when there’s a hole in the pipe. Now the science here is pretty complicated. A contractor accidentally made a hole in the pipe, and then the pressurized water exploded out, causing a big mess.
Off the Press was one of the first to hear about this situation when the water in our headquarters stopped working. We immediately put together that the PSE&G contractor was doing work in the area of a big water main and must have broken it, so we headed down there right away. Unfortunately, the water got all our notebooks wet so we lost our notes. We can say there was definitely water everywhere. Some people were even taking pictures of the pipe.
But what’s a Stevens student to do about this situation? Isn’t it the city’s job to work with the contractors to figure out the aftermath of the great pipe burst and make sure it doesn’t happen again? Or at least for a few weeks. Yes, it is. And they’ll do that. We hope. But in the meantime, you can think about fluid flow in pipes for a while. I mean, we didn’t even get to what happens when the pipe isn’t circular. Or laminar and turbulent flow. Pipes are great. You can also drop off some water bottles off at your local Off the Press office (there’s only one). We’ll give you our business card and a sticker that says, “I gave OTP some water bottles and they gave me this sticker.” You can make another hole in another water main somewhere else and see what happens. For legal reasons we technically have to advise against doing that though. So if you do do it, don’t tell them we suggested it. If you do it enough times you could really start doing some interesting statistical analysis.
If nothing else, let this article make you aware that designing and maintaining century-old water infrastructure is hard and this is why a bunch of people have jobs doing just that. It should also serve as a reminder that a lot of people need water for things, so we have to make sure we can get it for them. Off the Press can’t build pipes but we can tell people who don’t know anything about them a few fun facts.
