Sometime before 6:45 a.m. Friday, Dec. 12, a water main along Grove Street in Peterborough burst, cutting off water access between Vale Street and Main Street as well as in and around Depot Square. The break forced a road closure along Grove Street between Vale and School Street.
“The water pipes aren’t frozen, so we’re not quite sure what happened. We’ll have to dig it out to fully understand the situation,” Nate Brown from the Peterborough Department of Public Works said.
At the scene was Depot Square property manager, Steve Walker. “When I arrived around 6:45 this morning, the only other guy out here was a police officer. People thought this would be solved by noon, but it looks like there’s going to be a lot of work for these guys to do. I was over at Salon Exodus checking in to see if they had water; one of the hair specialists was with a client and unable to rinse their hair, so I ran over to Shaw’s to get seven gallons of water for them to use,” Walker said.
After hours of digging, a crew from the DPW fixed the break, returning water access to the area the same day. While the issue was resolved, the cause is still unknown. Brown stated that “if the break was radial or horizontal, we’d have a good idea of the cause, but because there was a hole in the pipe, we really don’t know what the source was. The ground wasn’t frozen enough, so we can rule that out.” He said he did not expect it to happen again.