AUBURN — An early morning water main break had crews scrambling Monday morning, working to reopen High Street at Minot Avenue and the Maine Central Railroad.
Auburn Water District Superintendent John Storer said the water leak was discovered about 3:50 a.m. Monday in an eight inch water line under High Street at the Minot Avenue intersection. Crews are still investigating to determine what failed.
“But it was some kind of catastrophic failure,” Storer said. “We were losing like 7,000 to 8,000 gallons of water a minute.”
The water didn’t run up on the road but stayed under the pavement, undermining High Street and the railroad tracks from below.
“We started digging on the asphalt, and there was a huge void,” he said. “The jackhammer just fell right in.”
Storer said he contacted the Guilford, the rail line’s owners to notify them of the break and the undermining. They’ve canceled all traffic on that line until the work is complete.
Both High Street and the train tracks should remain closed until early Tuesday morning.
Storer said he doubted that weather caused the break.
“Water line breaks can be fairly random events,” Storer said. “The weather was not excessively cold and we can’t trace it to a pump failure or other man-made issues. I think this is one of those things that happened — and it just so happened on the tail end of a major storm.”
But Storer said the weather will slow down crews working to repair the line and reopen the intersection.
“It made it tough to locate the valves to shut down the line,” he said. “And I always worry about crews working on slippery roads during storms like this.”
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