Water woes are ongoing in Tewksbury, Massachusetts, after a water main break over the holiday weekend left hundreds of people with unusable water, low water pressure, or no water at all.
This water main break was discovered Saturday– and a pump is one of the ways the town and private contractors have been trying to get some water to the hundreds of Tewksbury residents impacted by the main break.
As of late Tuesday afternoon, pumps were working on the road so residents would have enough water pressure to flush toilets. A boil water order remains in effect.
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According to the town manager, the areas affected are on Catamount Road and the nearby Lodge at Ames Pond Apartments – that has 360 units alone.
The leak was discovered when the local water treatment plant noticed they were losing a lot of water in this area.
The contractor repairing the break said that it might not have been noticed for awhile longer otherwise, because the 12-inch pipe that broke is under a five-foot tall and 20-foot wide culvert, 16 feet underground and the water was running down a stream.
That also complicates the repair process because the broken pipe is so hard to access.
“They put in a pump station to get water here," Jim Heider of Heider Building Association said. "We put in a secondary system, which is the tanks you see next to me. If they lose water, we can draw off these tanks. By this Friday we’re going to have a bypass system, which will be chlorinated and cleaned so that after Friday they can have full water, and then we can start the process of repairing the pipe.”
This is the temporary fix before the more permanent fix, because the contractor says it will likely take another month or two to fully repair it.
Another issue is that there will need to be a large excavation at the only entrance to the apartment.
Town manager Richard Montouri held a news conference on Tuesday morning to give an update on the situation, explaining that the pump to get water to the neighborhood wasn't able to push the water enough to make it up a hill, and a bypass line will be put in to get water to both the neighborhood and apartment, which could take three to four days.
Work is expected to begin on that Wednesday.
Meanwhile, crews are still working on the pump in hopes of getting water to at least the neighborhood sooner. Montouri asked for residents to be patient.
"It's obviously not something we planned for, it's a very unique break, if it were a normal water break that we see around town we would've had this fixed by now," Montouri said. "We are going to try to work every angle to get this done."
Residents reached out to NBC10 Boston over the weekend saying they either didn’t have any water, or not enough water to shower and wash dishes.
“The water’s brown, doesn’t smell good,” said Valerie Malta of Tewksbury.
Kamal Pillai, who took his family to stay with friends this weekend so they could shower, said, “We got water, but it was brown, and it’s low pressure, like barely dripping out.”
Residents are being told to boil water until the bypass system is set up and they get two tests that are negative for bacteria.
People throughout the area said the water issues started on Friday.
The town manager said there were actually two separate water main breaks affecting the same part of town – one on Friday and the more complex one on Saturday that’s causing the current water issues.
