A water main under Washington Street ruptured Thursday, spilling water into the street, disrupting traffic and briefly dropping water pressure for thousands of customers from Woolwich to West Bath.

The break happened in the 700 block of Washington St., in front of Bath Iron Works.

Traffic was snarled all evening as crews from the Bath Water District and Crooker and Sons of Topsham worked to repair the damage.

The main was repaired by 6 p.m. Thursday. There were no ongoing disruptions for customers.

Superintendent Trevor Hunt said he is not sure why a 30-inch-by-8 inch section of pipe blew out of the top of the main. He speculated hot weather may have caused some earth movement that led to the break.

“We can see water main breaks in extremely cold weather, or when there’s an earthquake,” he said. “The hot weather may have caused expansion in the ground that caused it to move.”

Because of a system of valve maintenance in place for 17 years, the water district was able to shut down the water quickly.

“If we had not taken on valve maintenance, it would have taken more than an hour to shut down the water,” Hunt said. “By then, the guard building at BIW would have floated away into the Kennebec.”

He said this is a major difference between Bath’s water maintenance program and Portland’s, whose recent water main breaks were far more catastrophic.

Hunt said he did not have an estimate of the volume of gallons lost, but water “dropped substantially in the tanks for a short period of time.”

ghamilton@timesrecord.com

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