Our Town in Crisis

You may have not seen it but Bradford made the national news the other day. Our whole town was without water this week. There was a break in the pipe at the University of Pittsburgh and we lost millions of gallons of water before it could be fixed. Therefore the water was shut of, pressure was lost, and the storage tanks were drained.

 

Benjamin, executive director of the Bradford City Water Authority, told the group gathered at City Hall that the 24-inch main water line, which supplies all of the water to Tuna Valley, had been repaired. The 63-year-old pipe, located six feet under the road at the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford, broke Monday during extreme cold temperatures. During the course of flooding the campus, more than 5 million gallons of water were lost from the water system and its reserves, virtually leaving the community dry.

People stocked up on bottled water by the gallons in order to wash, brush teeth and cook. We are still under a boil water order even though by now they have restored water to most people. We are still asked to conserve while the tanks replenish.
   We never lost our water out in the west side of town where we live but we lost pressure. Some people didn’t have it so lucky.  Not only did they lose water completely but water meters froze and a lot of people lost their heat.  People were melting snow ( a useless proposition since it takes 4 gallons of snow to make 1 gallon of water and it melts extremely slow even in the house) to flush their toilets.
   The town pulled together in this crisis and the fire departments and churches were handing out free water to those in need. Nearby towns also pitched in and we got through it.
  Bless the men of the water department who stood in deep freezing water with the temperatures of minus sixteen and worked through the night to make the repair.
    You never know how much you depend on systems working correctly until they go down.