Breaking news

As I was walking along this afternoon, mostly minding my own business, I found some breaking news. The intersection of College and Grove had running water, and the temperatures were too cold for snow melt. Plus there were several city vehicles and city workers standing around.
I decided to stop minding my own business and walked over to find out what was going on. There was water gushing from the ground in front of Monnett School. One of the guys was walking around with some kind of detection device putting markings on the ground. It was obvious that we had a water main break, but I asked what was happening anyway. The city workers were getting ready to shut off water to much of the south side of Rensselaer, which should already have noticed that the water pressure was not what it should be. Once they began to dig, they would also mess up traffic on College.

But they had prepared for that. Over a block away there was still water that had not found a storm sewer.
Update:
The effects of the break were more widespread than I expected. We lost water about an hour after I posted the pictures and text above. About 7:00 the water seemed to be coming back on, so I walked over to see how work was progressing. The workers were in the process of filling the hole.
Just as I was getting there a truck dumped a load of crushed stone into the hole. I did not get a picture of that, but did get some of the backhoe smoothing it out.
It was interesting the way they set up the lights so they could see what they were doing. They undoubtedly were glad that the break came tonight, and not a couple of nights ago when the temperatures were about twenty degrees colder.
The flagman was still there controlling the flow of traffic, but I suspect by now he has gone home.
According to the WLFI broadcast, Rensselaer is under a boil order for the next 48 hours.