If you were to lay Umeå’s water and sewage pipes in a row, they would reach almost to Paris. Around 350 miles of pipes and wires are buried here.
It’s a lot to keep track of when rapid weather changes and large temperature differences increasingly mean frozen street wells and leaks in the pipes underground.
– Often rapid weather changes mean more stretching in our lines and this creates a greater risk of leakage. Or that the ground moves so that the lines break, says Walter Jonasson, who works at the municipal VA company in Umeå.
Biggest problems below the ground surface
For him and his colleagues, the biggest problems are those that occur below the ground surface, for example when the frost depth changes and can then damage lines and pipes.
Water that collects above ground and creates floods and the like, is not as big a challenge.
– But for society as a whole, it is a problem. And for the individual citizen, it can be very troublesome when there are floods in basements and the like.