By MAUREEN DOHERTY
NORTH READING — On Monday morning residents in the Eugley Park West neighborhood off North Street awoke to having either brown water or low water pressure from their tap.
The inconvenience was caused by a major water main break discovered on Eugley Park West.
Reverse 9-1-1 used
“There was a water main break on Eugley Park West that was generating calls of brown water in different areas of town as water started flowing in a different direction than it normally flows. We did a Reverse 9-1-1 in the neighborhood only to let them know that the water was out and how long the water would be out for while they were doing a repair,” Town Administrator Mike Gilleberto told the Transcript.
Gillberto explained that “the water rushing out of the pipe eroded and washed things into the stream in the Eugley Park area causing the road to get somewhat compromised.”
This meant that the DPW had to deal with both repairing the water main break and a road that is going to need some repairs to it too.
Proving that water moves swiftly, it is not believed that the break occurred all that early based on the time when the DPW began fielding calls for brown water and when DPW crews located the break and got the water turned off in the neighborhood around 9 a.m. so it could be assessed and repaired, Gilleberto said.
Since the water was not flowing through any meters there was no alert of the spike in usage, he said. As of early Monday afternoon it did not appear that the water main break had caused a significant loss of water from the town’s storage tanks.
