NEWPORT — All of the roughly 250 people living in the Beverly Beach Water District north of Newport lost water for nearly 16 hours Wednesday when a major pipe was ruptured by a landslide that undermined a short stretch of Northeast Beverly Drive and dumped tons of dirt and rock into a pond just east of the road. The slide was just south of where Beverly Drive intersects Northeast 121st Street.
The line went out about 3:30 a.m. Wednesday. The water district was able to install a temporary water line and put it in service shortly before 8 p.m. Wednesday.
The water was brown with sediment Wednesday night and residents were advised by email to boil water used for cooking or drinking until further notice.
Tim Gross, a longtime water district board member and former Newport city engineer, said the line served 120 connections providing water to about 250 people.
The ruptured water line ran under the east shoulder of Beverly Drive, which collapsed dozens of feet into a pond just east of and below the road.
The 6-inch main supplies water to homes south of the Beverly Drive/121st Street intersection — more than half of the Beverly Beach community. The line also connects the water plant on Wade Creek, below and just south of Beverly Beach, to the district’s water tank in the hills above and northeast of the unincorporated community.
Lincoln County road crews Wednesday unloaded numerous dump trucks of rocks to fill the slide area and support the undermined road.
The landslide occurred sometime before 3:30 a.m. Wednesday and came up to the very edge of the east side of Beverly Drive, rendering that lane unsafe for travel. Residents were able to leave and re-enter the neighborhood using the other lane as one dump truck after another backed up to the slide to deposit more rock.
The slide area is near the east end of a 2018 stormwater drainage improvement project for which the Oregon Department of Transportation paid a contractor almost $1 million. The project was conducted, at least in part, because the stream-fed pond east of Beverly Drive was rising to levels that threatened to produce a landslide that could have flowed west onto U.S. Highway 101 and the beach below.
Local residents have complained that the contractor left the part of Beverly Drive that traverses the project in poor, bumpy condition, and the county patched the road there last year.
Gross said the county was claiming a leak in the water main may have caused the landslide, but he suspects it the landslide happened first and ruptured the water line, possibly due to poor backfilling during the 2018 project.
- Lee J. Siegel for YachatsNews
