Downtown water main break caused by corrosion on nearly 75-year-old pipe, city says
Erika McGuire
COLUMBIA, Mo. (KMIZ)
The City of Columbia says a water main break on 9th and Cherry Street Tuesday afternoon was caused by corrosion on a buried pipe.
Utility spokesman Jason West said “while it is part of the oldest pipes downtown, this particular pipe may be pushing 75-years old. This was a fairly routine fix, from what I am being told,”
A boil water advisory was issued for nearly 30 businesses in the area until 1 p.m. Wednesday.
The break has been repaired now, a cement slab covers the hole, surrounded by construction cones still blocking off the area.
Colleen Rieman part owner of Hexagon Alley in downtown Columbia said she found out about the break after a call from employees saying the water was not working. She says the break impacted Tuesday trivia night and caused them to turn business out the door.
“Usually Tuesday’s are a busier than they were last night we definitely turned some people away last night because of not being able to have any food,” Rieman said.
While the water main break was lifted, Rieman said Hexagon Alley would play it safe and use bottled water and bags of ice in hopes to return to normal operations Thursday.
“We bought ice this morning, we bought water bottles, we’re just not serving any of our coffee, we’re truing to figure out alternatives for the coffee but we’re encouraging people to use our bottled beverages,” Rieman added “We don’t have a stove we don’t so it really hard for us to do the safety precautions for that so thats why we had to switch to the bottle water,”
For bathrooms, Rieman said businesses in the area stepped up to help.
“Last night we weren’t able to use them so we asked our neighbors across the street let our customers use them but when they closed we kinda had to be like we just don’t have a bathroom for you,” She said.
Businesses like Booches and Goldie’s bagels were also impacted, however Sparky’s ice cream got lucky.
Sparky’s employee, Clara Strathausen saw the break and says the impact for them was minimal.
“A bunch of water going down cherry street i think it is, only thing that it would have been is parking of course but our water didn’t change colors or anything like that,” Strathausen said.