Two unrelated water main breaks disrupted water service to residents of the South Avenue area on separate occasions last week. Both were repaired after some long hours by Department of Public Works employees.

“One had absolutely nothing to do with the other, but they were both the same type of leaks,” said DPW Superintendent Donnie Westhaver. “We had people ask why we didn’t knock on their doors [Sunday] to tell them the water was down. In an emergency situation you don’t have time to tell people you’re shutting it down. We’re dealing with safety.”

Perhaps as many as 120 Whitman homes were without water service for almost 22 hours between Thursday and Friday — Jan. 26-27 — as crews from the Department of Public Works labored to repair a water main break at South Avenue and Winter Street.

The repair area was re-paved Monday after the soil had completely settled. Crews were also spending Monday repaving the road way in the Kendrick Street area after a leak was first noted Saturday night, but worsened considerably overnight.

The Sunday job was made more difficult by the presence of three natural gas pipes surounding it. Crews had to wait for National Grid to pump out water and test lines to determine it was safe to continue repair work around the one still-active gas line on  a “T” junction of an older 12-inch pipe that was spitting water. A 20-foot section of water main had to be replaced, disupting water service for about 60 households for about 18 hours — until about 3 a.m. Monday.

 “We worked as fast as we could,” Westhaver said.

While there were no natural gas pipes involved in Thursday’s break, it carried challenges of its own.

“We had a collar on an old 10-inch trasite [cement] line rupture, and I think it was leaking a long time before it decided to surface,” said Westhaver. “Police called us about 6:15 a.m. [Thursday]. I went up there and the water was coming out of the road pretty good.”

Workers started repairs at about 7:30 a.m. Thursday and completed the job at about 4:30 a.m. Friday. It was hard to detect which side was leaking — South Avenue or Winter St. — because beside the main was an old cast iron main that was presumed dead years ago. It wasn’t.

While cold was not the usual factor it would be for a January repair, the rain and — briefly — snow, made conditions less than ideal, according to Westhaver.

“It was a lousy dig,” he said. “We had to shut off several gates just to shut that down, that was the problem. There was no way to shut if down but to shut off three or four different sections of that part of town.”

DPW workers knocked on doors in the affected area to advise as many residents as possible that the water was being shut off for the repair, but where no one was home during the day they had to find out by turning on an unresponsive faucet.

“When the second [pipe] let go, we had to shut it down as quick as we could,” he said. “We had a lot of people stop by — obviously there was something going on — they were curious when the water would be back on.”

The gate in front of 542 South Ave. on the first pipe was the one they needed as it turned out. Water line gates allow work crews to shut down sections for repair without cutting off an entire area of town water service.

The shutoff area extended to all of Regal Street, Apollo Road, South Avenue between numbers 540 and 720, and about half of Winter Street. Discovery of the still-active cast iron main was an unusual event, according to Westhaver.

“We’ve replaced a lot of cast-iron mains over the past 10 years, so the majority of the town is OK,” he said.

Records, which go back only to 1932, indicate the town evidently left older mains active and capped them as they were being replaced, rather than go to the expense of removing the cast iron pipes. No notation was made.

Westhaver estimates there are three or four more old cast iron mains that are capped but still active left in town. He sees a need to think about replacing some old gates that weren’t shut down correctly in the past.

When water was turned back on, hydrants were opened to “burp” the line so residents would not experience air hammer or discolored water when they turned on the faucet Friday.

As a result of the break, and a previous one on Pleasant Street, the DPW plans to conduct a long-term project of removing more of the older mains in coming years as well as a lot of gate and hydrant replacement, including so-called traffic hydrants that limit damage in collisions to the top of the hydrant which breaks away, with no subterranean leaks.

 Westhaver is also planning to conduct another extensive leak detection program in town. The last one was conducted 10-12 years ago, which led to pipe replacement at the time.