Dry Weather Responsible for Water Main Breaks

The dry weather is responsible for a recent string of water main breaks in the Maysville Regional Water District.

General Manager Beth Shook said that seven water main breaks have been reported over the past month.  She said that older lines from the 1970s are to blame for some of the incidents, but the lack of rain is also a factor.

"This time of year it seems like when the weather is dry and we don’t have very much rain, the ground starts to get hard," said Shook.  "We do seem to have more water main breaks when that happens.  It wants to shift and then if you have a weak spot in your pipe, there’s high pressure and it just wants to find the weakest point and that’s where it goes."

She said those water main breaks led to several boil advisories and water samples were sent to a lab as a precaution.  The widespread power outage that resulted from the June 29th severe storm created some obstacles for the district.

"We have a generator here that operated the plant the whole time, so it was running on a natural gas generator," said Shook.  "We rented generators for each of our booster stations to keep everybody with water."

Shook said crews worked around the clock to make the best of a bad situation.