The catastrophic failure of a high-pressure line in Waterbury’s aging water system left Connecticut’s fifth largest city and most of two suburbs, Wolcott and Watertown, without water Saturday, forcing a scramble to keep open two hospitals and bring in water by tankers and truckloads of bottles.
City officials said an earlier failure of a 10-inch water line installed in 1901 undermined a 42-inch, 55-year-old transmission main that burst with explosive force late Friday night on Thomaston Avenue by Waterville Park, launching pavement into the air and shattering windows.
With damage still being assessed and no firm timetable for restoration, the break prompted a massive response by city and state agencies, including the National Guard and state Division of Emergency Management and Homeland Security. School was canceled for Monday in Waterbury, and the city’s restaurants were ordered closed.
Fire hydrants were nonfunctional, and in the few areas where the taps had limited pressure, the water was not safe to drink without out boiling. Using plans developed during the COVID-19 pandemic, the state and city prepared to distribute water at two locations no later than Sunday.
“The Guard is here. We’re going to have water distribution, potable water, big racks of it, a little like what we had in Rentschler Field during COVID,” Gov. Ned Lamont said in a midday briefing with Mayor Paul K. Pernerewski Jr. at Waterbury’s public works headquarters.
Bottled water would be available at 9 a.m. Sunday at Municipal Stadium on Watertown Avenue and Crosby High School on Pierpont Road until 5 p.m. or the supply is depleted.
The consequences of the failure are unprecedented, amplified by the city’s belated program to upgrade infrastructure after decades of neglect. A second high-pressure main that could have provided nearly uninterrupted service was off line, being reinforced with a thick plastic liner.
“We had planned on pressure-testing that on Monday, chlorinating it, and samples were going to go out next week to clear it to be put back in use,” said Brad Malay, the city’s water superintendent.
The rupture occurred on one of the two high-pressure lines that feed the system from a city-owned water treatment plant miles away in Thomaston.
“The 1970 main was actually fine, but when the 1901 main failed, it washed out the other main. They reside across the road from each other,” Malay said. “And due to the age the fragility of those pipes, it doesn’t take a lot for those pipes to, you know, let go.”
Water from the plant to the main was cut off, but water still flowed from the break more than 12 hours after the rupture as the system emptied. Valves that could have localized the impact were fragile and could not be closed, officials said.
“The biggest problem that we have that causes the most trouble, frankly, are the valves, because you could isolate breaks and leaks along the way that would have the most minimal impact,” Pernerewski said. “The problem we have is that we get to a lot of these valves, and we go to tighten them and shut them, they don’t work. We can’t get them closed, and so we have to spread to bigger and bigger areas that get affected by it. And that’s part of the problem that we’re having here.”
Malay said new valves are now tested every six months at his order, by “exercising” them, essentially closing and opening them, but the older ones are not. The risk is greater than the reward, he said.
“Once a valve reaches a certain point, nobody wants to touch it, because you don’t want to break it by exercising it, and then be the guy who’s now caused the problem,” he said. “So everybody leaves it alone until the guy who needs to close it. And it’s been 25 years since anybody touched it.”
Waterbury, a city that fell into insolvency and state oversight a quarter century ago, is in the midst of a $30 million program to strengthen a water system built to meet the needs of a once-thriving brass industry and the dense neighborhoods that housed its workers.
“The problem is that even if you had enough money to do it all at once, you cannot simply replace the entire system at once, because you’d have to shut it down. So you have to do it in discrete parts,” Pernerewski said.
The city is doing what it can, he said. This time, a major break came at the worst time, when the backup was under repair.
“We just unluckily got caught this year with a couple bad breaks on our transmission needs,” Malay said.
This story was originally published by the Connecticut Mirror.
