On Aug. 30, 2020, we experienced a water main break at the corner of Westbrook and Woodbine Roads. Approximately 500 homes and businesses in the Westbrook area were impacted by a water outage, and crews worked quickly to repair the main and restore water services to our customers. 

We do everything we can to minimize the duration of these service interruptions. In this case, the outage was expected to last 10 hours. Our crews worked extremely well together, to restore the outage in four hours. 

About the repair

The type of break we experienced is referred to as a blowout. It occurred on a 12-inch ductile iron water main. Crews repaired the break using a wraparound clamp.

Water main breaks most often occur on aging infrastructure. For example, they’re more likely to happen on older corrosive materials, such as cast or ductile iron, and with more traditional installation techniques.

We're working to improve infrastructure

Through proactive infrastructure renewal programs, we identify priority areas and takes steps to responsibly renew aging infrastructure. Some of the work we have undertaken to help improve the reliability of water infrastructure serving Westbrook is as follows:

• Structurally relined 1,100 metres of water main in Westbrook to create a tough new “pipe-within-a -pipe” that ensures the reliability of the pipe for up to 50 additional years, and replaced 640 metres.
• Added cathodic protection to metallic water mains on Woodbine Road, to increase the life of this infrastructure.
• Better data means better decisions: we installed a district water meter on Woodbine Road to help identify water leaks in the local system.

Learn more!

View our video and webpage on water main breaks to learn more.