City deals with string of water main breaks

COHOES, N.Y. » The Spindle City’s aging infrastructure has caused city officials to have to deal with over five water main breaks in less than two weeks.

The most recent water main break occurred around 5:30 a.m. Friday near Manor Avenue and Baker Avenue.

Mayor Shawn Morse also mentioned that as of around 9 a.m. Friday, officials were also dealing with a broken hydrant on Saratoga Street.

On New Year’s Eve, city officials had to deal with a major gas leak that shut down Olmstead Street between Van Vechten and Ontario Street and forced residents from three nearby apartment buildings to evacuate. Morse said there have also recently been other breaks on Saratoga Street, James Street and Manor Avenue has had a few recently as well.

“We’ve had about five or six breaks in the last 10 days, so we’ve been really busy,” said Morse on Friday morning. “It’s the reality of the living in the Northeast with the cold weather and you know infrastructure that is extremely old and these are problems facing the city of Cohoes as well as any other community in the upstate New York area.”

Morse said that the city has been able to afford the costs associated with having Department of Public Works employees fix the breaks since city officials tried to set aside funds in the budget for this type of work.

“We’ve been lucky enough that during our budget process, we’ve been very diligent and we try to think well down the road [about] what could happen ... so financially we’ve covered our bases, but you know, you can only sustain so many of them before you start digging into money that you haven’t put aside for breaks and that’s worrisome,” explained Morse.

Morse credited his DPW employees for working hard on holidays and in frigid working conditions outside to fix all the recent breaks as quickly as they possi-

bly could.

“We have one of the best [DPW] crews in the Capital Region, if not in the country,” said Morse. “They are standing in water up to their knees in frigid temperatures and they are keeping our city operating.”

Morse said he expects that roughly seven homes were impacted by the most recent water main break on Manor Avenue on Friday morning. Officials said the water main break was fixed by early afternoon Friday and people had water service.

Morse said it is hard to prevent the water breaks from occurring.

“There is no preventing them unless there’s money available to start digging up old infrastructure and [replacing] them with newer pipes,” said Morse. “I mean some of these pipes are hundreds of years old; there’s times we’ve dug them up and found wooden pipes.”