Matthew Burnette, Staff Writer

In his 39 years as General Manager of the Duck River Utilities Commission, Randal Braker says they have only had to call for voluntary conservation on three occasions.

The first was in 1998 when a large flood caused a massive inflow of mud and other debris into the reservoir causing water quality issues, leading to an upgrade in the process for handling that situation that hasn’t occurred since.

A second call was made in the late 2000s when a drought led to a statewide conservation effort, and the third occurred on the weekend of Feb. 7, 2026.

After the recent cold snap, DRUC noticed a high amount of demand on their system, presumably from undetected broken pipes due to freezing, which led to a call for voluntary conservation of water in all communities that the commission services, including Manchester and Tullahoma.

“We rely on those systems to communicate to the customers directly. We don’t have customer contact information or anything like that. We’re kind of like TVA,” explained Braker. “We don’t have any way to contact you at home, so we reached out, which is a normal process for us to do a chain of command kind of thing. We say, “Hey, we need to conserve. Can you please communicate with your customers and get them to conserve?’”

Despite that call, Braker says that the amount of demand was relatively unchanged, a disappointing result.

Then, a leak was discovered on a 2500-pound valve on the main water line at DRUC. Braker estimates that the leak was losing about 100,000 gallons a day but would have been manageable had conservation efforts been taken more seriously.

The leak then worsened and the call had to be made to replace the valve.

“There’s a point at which you can ignore a leak for a little while, but you can’t wait until a line blows apart and then you’ve got a three-day repair,” explained Braker. “So, in an abundance of caution for us, we decided Monday morning we were going to fix it, so we brought in a contractor, and we acquired the necessary parts.”

DRUC crew members, a crew from Judy Construction and some employees from the Tullahoma Utilities Authority worked on the repair for 10 hours.

They were unable to replace the valve and instead had to make a temporary fix by replacing it with a piece of pipe, Braker says that if the valve had continued to leak, it could have led to a more dire water depletion.

“The main storage tanks were empty, and the system was running off of a secondary tank, and the secondary tanks were below half full when we finally got back on,” he noted.

“That means we had no firefighting flow capability, and that means that we were within hours of people beginning to run out of water,” he continued. “It should not have been that risky, but because we couldn’t get water conservation and we couldn’t get our tanks full again, we had to make a risky repair in a scenario where it wasn’t really the best time to do it, but the alternative of having a catastrophic failure on the main transmission line is too great to take that risk, so we had to do what we had to do.”

Though the leak didn’t help the situation, Braker says that it shouldn’t be the focus.

“I’m really disappointed to see this leak take over the story and take the emphasis from the actual issue which was that the water demand in the system didn’t abate after the cold snap,” he noted.

Braker says that the repair brought the system back to essentially the same situation it was in when the initial call for conservation was made.

“We’ve got really low storage tanks, and we really need conservation so we can catch back up quicker than we would normally be able to,” he emphasized. “The desire there is to regain firefighting flow. We do not want a house to catch on fire right now because we don’t have a lot of water in the tank.”

“We’re not asking people to skip a bath,” he added. “We’re just asking for people to not wash their cars and not do things that use water that’s not necessary or essential. Flushing and drinking and bathing are not the things that we’re trying to get people to cut back on. It’s the unnecessary use of water that seems to be a problem for a few.”

Braker also cleared up a couple of misconceptions that he had seen on social media about the situation, the first being that cost had anything to do with it.

“Manchester did raise their price, but that doesn’t really have anything to do with it,” he said. “This is the DRUC that’s asking for cutbacks, not Manchester, and we didn’t raise the price. We haven’t actually raised the price for three years, and we haven’t raised the price but 25 cents for 20 years. This is not related to cost of service. We have the lowest price in the state. This is about not running out of water.”

Another falsehood that Braker says he read several times was that the issues had anything to do with infrastructure and a lack of planning and maintenance.

“We have three construction projects in process right now to spend over $15 million upgrading our components in our system that’s mostly based around drought management, the Duck River Watershed Partnership activities that are going on right now and the demand for growth and the system’s growth in the area,” he said.

“There’s nothing in our system that’s old and nothing in our system that’s aged infrastructure,” he continued. “We have long replaced everything in our system to create a redundant system. The only thing that we have that’s not actually redundant is the giant water line that feeds the system. One could put two of them in, but that’s a price that people really don’t want to pay I don’t think.”

Reflecting on the situation, Braker says that he is grateful for those who stepped in to help with the repair and hopes that it gives the community an appreciation of the water system.

“If we hadn’t have had some really dedicated people, we probably would have run out of water, and I think people don’t appreciate that, that you open that faucet up and water comes out,” he explained. “You never think about it. Then when this happens, it’s sad some of the reactions you get from people who seem like they don’t really appreciate the fact that water comes out of their faucet every day for 39 years without fail.”