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The town of Framingham MA is a town of over 250 miles of water main and 17,000 service
connections. They had a problem common to a municipal water system this large and that was
aging and wide spacing of their existing gate valves. The problem would be magnified if a water
main occurred in the wrong place or at the wrong time. “We have areas that we would have to
shut down 10-12 gate valves in order to isolate one small section for a main repair, according to
Water Operations Manager, Dave Brunelle. This would waste thousands of gallons of water and
would take hours to attempt a successful shutdown.”

The Framingham DPW contacted Putnam Pipe in Hopkinton MA to discuss their problem which
involved the new valve placement, scheduling, material needs and installation techniques.
Putnam’s sales representative for that area, Eli Potty immediately began to work on the problem.

The solution- Install Romac Quik Valves in critical areas throughout the town. This would help
minimize the exposure to a main break in the wrong area, and help them avoid operating aging
gate valves. Romac Quik Valves are an insertion valve and sleeve combination which allows the
customer to install a resilient seat gate valve anywhere in their system without any interruption in
water service. This issue was critical in the decision for the town to choose the Romac Quik
Valve.

Putnam Pipe contracts all of their service work with E J Prescott, who is the only authorized
installer of Quik Valves in New England, and together they began to work on the logistics for
Framingham. Due to the location of the valve insertions, the time of day, and traffic interruptions,
they decided to do six valve insertions in 3 days and possibly one in the middle of the night if
necessary. They decided to use two service crews to expedite the work and ensure the success
of the installations. They used Ray Morang out of the Gardiner ME division and Ken Holhut from
the Springfield MA division.

The installations began in early June of 2007 and were completed in 3 days. The service work
was on a variety of mains in various conditions and in one case a different size main was
discovered as the main was uncovered. Relying on the Putnam and Prescott network and the
vast inventory available, the change is size was handled within 2 hours and the job went on as
scheduled. The town now has six new critical resilient wedge gate valves in key areas and not
one customer was without water the entire time.

“We never would have attempted this all at once, until
assured by the people at Putnam that we could pull
it all together”. Everything went great and we now
are looking at several other locations to
install the same type of valves.