City of Milledgeville calls water main breaks “unavoidable”

UPDATED 7/28/16 at 11:16 p.m.

MILLEDGEVILLE, Georgia (41NBC/WMGT) – Georgia College will be closed friday and all classes are cancelled. Essential personell are to report to work as usual.

The city says all of the water lines have been repaired.

MILLEDGEVILLE, Georgia (41NBC/WMGT) – Five water main breaks in three days are leaving Milledgeville residents on a boil water advisory.

Mayor Gary Thrower and City Manager Barry Jarrett are perplexed as to why the breaks keep occurring.

“This is a very unusual phenomenon,” Thrower said.

City workers have been working day and night to make the repairs. Water Distribution Superintendent Kevin Veal can’t pinpoint the problem either.

“We don’t know what caused this one to break nor the others,” Veal said at a repair sight on E. Walton St. “We’re sending a pipe off to a lab tomorrow so that’ll tell us more.”

Workers on the scene said the burst pipes are in great condition, even though they date back 50 years.

Mayor Thrower says they hope to get the problem fully resolved by Saturday, and are looking at measures to prevent the water outages in the future. Thrower commended the workers who are repairing the water main breaks. They work in holes that during the day, can reach a heat index of 113 degrees.

“I think it’s kind of impossible to prepare for a major water main break because it’s such an infrequent occurrence,” Thrower said.

Despite Thrower calling it an infrequent occurrence, he says another water main break could happen at any time.

Approximately 100 businesses and restaurants are closed because of the boil advisory. Oconee Regional Medical Center is using 6,000 gallon tanks to prevent turning patients away.

41NBC will continue to investigate this story.