City dry for hours as water mains burst on Headford Road

By Dara Bradley

A major burst on a mains pipe that supplies water to the city centre occurred on yesterday morning causing widespread outages for some time.

Local authority crews managed to repair the pipe by yesterday afternoon and water was restored to businesses and homes in Galway.

The burst occurred at around 6am on Monday – the cause of the damage is not yet known. Many households woke up to no water supply and cafes were caught short for the morning rush.

The damaged pipe was on the Headford Road and was connected to the city’s reservoir in Coolough.

Director of Services Ciaran Hayes said the Council was able to divert water fairly quickly from other reservoirs so that water to most premises in the city centre could be restored. A small portion of the city, mostly in and around the burst pipe at the Headford Road, had its water cut-off until the leak was repaired later on in the afternoon.

Workers spent most of Monday repairing the burst mains, which inevitably caused traffic disruption along the Headford Road, one of the main arteries into the city.

City Councillor Niall McNelis said it was not good enough that the City Council’s phone network was ‘down’ on Monday as well. He said businesses were left in the dark about the problem. “We’d no water in the city centre, we’d no phones working at City Hall and we’d no information,” he said.

Mr Hayes said it was the ‘perfect storm’ because the burst water main also coincided with problems with the phones system at City Hall.

“It was out of our control . . . we are having problems with the phone system since Friday and it’s just unfortunate that the phones were down on Monday,” said Mr Hayes.

He confirmed that calls to City Hall were diverted to a call centre in Cork and he said that the people answering the phones were kept up to date on the burst mains.

“We updated our website to inform people . . . it happened very early in the morning but we managed to sort it out relatively quickly,” he said, adding that he spoke to Cllr McNelis personally about the issue.

The burst mains had no connection with road works being carried out at the Headford Road roundabout. Nor did it have anything to do with a series of water conservation works being carried out in local areas right across the city this week, he said. The Council is installing ‘pressure reducing valves’ in various locations and localised outages will last for a few hours.

Mr Hayes said premises affected will be notified of when they can expect disruptions.