City of Dayton sues bridge contractor they say is responsible for 2019 water outage

DAYTON — The City of Dayton is asking for at least $2 million in damages in a civil lawsuit against the Keowee Street bridge contractor they said caused the water main break in February 2019 that caused water issues across the city and Montgomery County, according to court records.

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The city is suing Sidney-based Eagle Bridge Co. in the lawsuit that was filed around 11:30 a.m. Friday.

The lawsuit alleges that Eagle Bridge Co. was negligent in its construction of the Keowee Street bridge and the surrounding construction work, causing a water main to break and leading to more than 150 million gallons of treated drinking water to dump into the river.

“The system lost water pressure and thousands of customers experienced water outages,” the lawsuit alleges. “Dayton experienced significant emergency costs in personnel, materials and equipment to shut off the water to the Water Main and to increase the water pressure to the rest of the system to restore service to its customers.”

Montgomery County hired Eagle Bridge in 2017 to replace the Keowee Street Bridge.

A June 2019 demand letter from Dayton to Eagle Bridge Co. obtained by Cox Media Group through a public records request. The city at the time estimated a cost in lost water, emergency response, increased utility costs and final repair is likely to exceed $1.5 million.

“As part of its work under the contract, Eagle Bridge Company constructed two channels within the Great Miami River to divert the river during the construction of the new bridge,” says John Musto, Dayton’s chief trial counsel, in the demand letter. “The diversion channels did not include proper downstream provisions to adequately transition both flows and velocities during the normal construction and water conditions.”

“As a result, the two channels that Eagle Bridge Company created caused up to 30 feet of erosion,” Musto says in the letter. “This erosion dislodged and broke the city’s 36-inch water main that was buried in the embankment just 200 feet from the bridge on February 13, 2019.”

“We didn’t do any work on that water line at all,” said Thomas Frantz, Eagle Bridge’s vice president in July 2019. “They have made some allegations. It’s under investigation right now.”

Eagle Bridge executives declined to discuss the allegations further.

Montgomery County’s Administrator Michael Colbert told Cox Media Group last year, “There is absolutely no evidence to suggest that the work done by a contractor working on the Keowee Street Bridge had anything to do with the February water main break and the resulting outage.”

“This is a claim that has been put forward by the city of Dayton and directed to the contractor, and the matter will have to be resolved between those two parties,” Colbert said in a statement.

Cox Media Group