Boil water orders for certain sections of the city and county were lifted Friday morning, 40 hours after a major water main break on Linton Way Wednesday.
At about 7 p.m. Wednesday, a motorist driving on Linton Way noticed water across the roadway and alerted authorities.
When Princeton Water and Wastewater personnel arrived at the scene, they found the source of the water: a 20-foot section of 12-inch water pipe split down the middle.
“It was a very, very bad leak,” said Water Superintendent Joey Anderson Thursday. “We lost half a million gallons of water in less than two hours.”
The weather may be to blame for the rupture, he added.
Warmer temperatures that thawed the ground this week after several days below freezing may have caused the water line to shift and come in contact with some of the rock spread throughout the Linton Hill soil.
The bottom section of the PVC main had ruptured “from hub to spigot,” Anderson said.
The 20-foot section of line had to be replaced, a process that was completed at about 4 a.m. Thursday.
While the work was under way, the repair crew shut off water from Linton Way to Marion Road. Customers in certain sections of Centennial Drive and on Micbeth Drive were also affected.
The Linton Way main, Anderson said, is also the main feed line for the city’s high-level system, fed from a tank on Skyline Drive.
With the connection shut off, water for those high-level customers was supplied from the tank itself while the repair process was under way.
Once the line was back in service, crew members flushed it from a hydrant at the end of Linton Way, then took samples for bacteriological testing.
Such testing is required by the Kentucky Division of Water any time pressure in the system drops below 20 pounds per square inch.
The water department issued a boil water advisory as a precautionary measure for customers affected by the break.
The order, which covered sections of Marion Road, North Jefferson Street, Dawson Road, Centennial Drive and Micbeth Drive, was lifted by the Kentucky Division of Water’s Allen Kidd at 10:50 a.m. Friday.
The Caldwell County Water District, which receives its water from the Princeton utility, also issued a boil order related to the outage.
That order, affecting customers on Marion Road, Ky. 293 North, U.S. 62 West, Ky. 70 and Ky. 139 North, was lifted at 11 a.m. Friday.
The outage also led officials with the Caldwell County School District to close the county’s schools Thursday.
The schools reopened Friday with precautions in place while the order remained in effect. Bottled water was distributed to students during the day.
