Workers from the City of Mount Pleasant spent more than 24 hours trying to fix the break at S. Washington Street and Hopkins Court — between Powers and Robinson halls — in below-freezing temperatures. It was because of the cold weather that the old pipes broke, said Malcolm Fox, water superintendent for the City of Mount Pleasant.

“The problem was fixed at the time, but it configured underground and tied in through some steam tunnels,” Fox said. “We want to revisit it.”

Fox said two things need to be done — a new valve needs to be installed and some mains are going to be tied back together.

Residence Life Assistant Director Grant Skomski said he was concerned that the road hasn’t been repaved.

“I had an exchange of e-mails with Bob Matouka (associate vice president of Facilities Management) and I believe it was a problem with the city,” Skomski said. “I was concerned that it was still an eyesore because the road wasn’t fixed and we had Special Olympics coming up.”

Fox said they still have research to do before they can finish the work.

“We’re going to flush the hydrants and flush out the whole city,” he said.

Fox said flushing the hydrants is routine maintenance that is done during the summer, when there aren’t as many students around to be affected.

“All water systems everywhere conduct similar maintenance, flushing out the whole entire system,” he said.

The operation is done by opening the hydrants in a specific order and flushing out the system, cleaning out minerals and exercising the valves, he said.

Fox said the new valve just replaces the one that failed.

“The valve failed the night of the water main break but we took it out of the ground,” Fox said.

He said the failed valve didn’t really have any affect on residents.

“It was nothing at all. The average person would have no idea other than the fact that it bubbled up that day and we had a mess,” he said. “(The valve) just helps us isolate different segments of the water system. We have hundreds of other valves nearby.”

South Washington Street was covered in water from the Bovee University Center to beyond Powers Hall in February. Powers, Warriner, West and Wightman halls as well as the North Art Building lost water when the main broke.

“I spent 30 hours on the job that day and our crews stuck with it. We had two shifts working,” Fox said.

City crews worked from the night of the break until the next morning fixing the pipe. After the workers thought they had finished, they discovered an additional break further down the line.

“The main itself was fixed but we want to tie it back together with another main,” Fox said. “There weren’t a lot of maps and we don’t have a clear feel of how it works right now. We want to investigate that because it’s out of date.”

Fox said the maps are updated every year after flushing out the hydrants, but they can’t know where everything is until they dig.

“We’re constantly looking to update our maps, and we have a very modern (Geographical Information System) system maintained by our engineers,” he said. “That is just basically a combination of maps in the database and the tools to look at maps and database together. We have crews with GIS system computers in their trucks.”

Fox said another water main on South Washington Street, north of High Street, is being replaced now and one south of High Street is scheduled for replacement sometime in the future.

“Every year we try to replace parts of the whole system. We spend hundreds of thousands of dollars every year doing this,” he said.

Fox said the water main that broke outside Powers Hall cost several hundreds of dollars which is not atypical.