Waterbury officials gave residents the all-clear Thursday to resume drinking the city’s water following an unprecedented six-day outage. But the city now faces an even more formidable task: ensuring that such a crisis does not happen again. Already, the head of Waterbury’s water department h as announced an emergency effort to identify and replace a number of stuck or broken valves that have been identified as critical weak points in the system. The cost of that effort — which comes on top of $30 million the city has already spent on upgrades to its water system this year — has yet to be determined, but officials say they don’t intend to wait until next year’s budget cycle to begin the work. By focusing on valves at key intersections, officials say they hope to be able to prevent future problems from becoming widespread. “I don’t think anyone can stand here and tell you that in any water system there’s never going to be a break or a leak or a problem,” said Waterbury Mayor Paul Pernerewski. “But if we can contain it in a much smaller area, it’ll make a big difference.” Over the last week, Pernerewski and his staff have described the citywide outage as an almost-freak occurrence, brought on by a cascading sequence of events. It began last Wednesday, when a 12-inch-wide pipe near the intersection of Thomaston Avenue and Manville street started leaking, which forced street closures but otherwise caused no wider disruptions in water service. While crews went to work to fix the leak, however, they discovered there were no valves that could cut off the flow of water into the area. On Friday, the pipe burst. The resulting flood of water washed away the soil under an adjacent high-pressure main that normally delivers 10 million gallons of water a day to the East End and other areas of the city. Without ground supporting it, the larger pipe caved under the weight of the street, sending torrents of water to the surface and hurling rocks and chunks of asphalt in all directions. The location where the break occurred was just south of an another section of pipe that was undergoing maintenance, which prevented workers from quickly establishing a bypass to keep water flowing from one end of the city to the other. By Friday evening nearly the entire city of 115,000 people, along with the neighboring towns of Watertown and Wolcott, was without water. “It was kind of the worst thing you could imagine, and it all happened,” said Bradley Malay, the city’s superintendent of water. The outage forced Waterbury schools to close for several days and prevented restaurants from serving food and drinks. Thousands of residents lined up for bottled water that had to be shipped in from out of state. Despite the fluky nature of the break, it exposed the broader fragility of the city’s water system, some of which dates back over a century. The leaking pipe that kicked off the crisis, for example, was laid in 1901. Experts said this week that Waterbury is hardly alone when its comes to the challenge of maintaining its vast underground network of aging pipes, gaskets, pumps and valves. Both in Connecticut and across the country as a whole, many public water systems rely on infrastructure that is in desperate need of replacement. In a report released earlier this year, the American Society of Civil Engineers graded that nation’s drinking water infrastructure a C-minus, and said that around $670 billion was needed to bring public systems up to a state of good repair. Current levels of funding would only cover slightly over half that amount, the report said. A sign at a Waterbury business details impact from the water line issues on December 18, 2025. Credit: Shahrzad Rasekh / CT Mirror “It is definitely a challenge,” said Betsy Gara, executive director of the Connecticut Water Works Association. “At the same time, there’s a lot of pressure to keep rates low, and that makes it difficult sometimes for utilities to move forward with their capital budget.” In Connecticut, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimated in 2021 that the state’s long-term needs for drinking water infrastructure amounted to more $4.9 billion, most of which was necessary for maintenance of transmission and distribution lines. That includes the cost of replacing thousands of lead service lines, which can potentially leach toxins into customers’ water. In order to help water utilities manage those costs, the Connecticut Department of Public Health manages a revolving fund to provide low-interest loans for water infrastructure projects. Since the program began in 1996, it has invested nearly $542 million in 341 projects, according to a DPH spokesperson. Craig Palta, the president of the Connecticut Water Company, an investor-owned utility, said the pressure to keep water rates low — particularly in municipal-owned systems — has resulted in deferred maintenance that makes large, disruptive breaks more likely to occur. In some parts of the state, he said, pipes are being replaced at such a slow rate that many could remain in service for hundreds of years. “A day of reckoning is coming or is happening,” Palta said. “And with Waterbury, I believe it’s happened.” Speaking to reporters earlier this week, Malay was careful to avoid directly criticizing his predecessors at the Waterbury Water Department, which he has led since January. However, he described the catastrophic failure of the Thomaston Avenue main as a wake-up call for the city. “I think this has shown us that when, throughout the years and over the decades, you just let things kind of fall into disrepair because they were working, it’s not the correct approach,” Malay said. Following an earlier incident in October in which a separate water main burst on nearby Huntingdon Ave., sending a geyser shooting 40 feet into the air and disrupting service for about 1,500 residents, Malay said he began developing a capital improvement plan for next year to address some of the city’s most pressing water infrastructure needs. The events of the last week led Pernerewski and Malay to expedite those plans. While attempting to isolate the outage and restore service to parts of the city, Malay said the water department discovered several malfunctioning valves that need to be replaced in order to give the system an added layer of redundancy. In addition, once the work to repair the Thomaston Avenue main is completed, Waterbury will again have three transmission lines capable of supplying the bulk of the city’s water. If one of those lines were to suffer another break, Malay said, the valves would allow the water to be routed along the other lines to avoid a large-scale disruption in service. Construction on the Thomaston Ave water main that broke last week, leading to the loss of water service, on December 18, 2025. Credit: Shahrzad Rasekh / CT Mirror Mayor Pernerewski plans to meet with Malay and the city’s finance team on Monday to outline the next steps and any available funding sources for the most critical valve replacement projects, according to spokeswoman Jennifer Rose. That work is expected to start in early 2026. “The city is not aware of any prior outage of this scale or duration, certainly not in our lifetimes, and we hope it is never repeated, particularly once these critical valves are replaced or installed,” Rose said in email. “These valve replacements will allow water crews to isolate sections of pipe if a water main break occurs, significantly reducing the impact on residents and businesses.” In the longer term, Malay said he will also move forward with a capital plan to address some of the city’s older, cast-iron pipes that are in danger of cracking and bursting. Modern pipes are typically made with ductile iron, which is less brittle and more resistant to changing temperatures. Even some of the city’s older maps supposedly showing where the miles of pipes and other components are buried, Malay said, are outdated and in need of digitizing. “The system is designed beautifully,” Malay said. “It’s the maintenance and the upkeep and everything else that kind of fell by the wayside through the decades, and now we’re paying the price for that, and those things have to be fixed.” ...read more read less