Water service went dark Wednesday across a stretch of downtown Conway Borough after a waterline broke during gas replacement work, leaving homes and businesses from 1st to 5th avenues without a working tap and no word on when service will return.
The borough said the break happened during a gas replacement project along Route 65 near 13th Street, according to WTAE. Crews shut off water service in that section of the downtown area as a result, and as of the station's report, no estimate had been given for when service would be restored.
Once the water does come back on, the work isn't over for residents. Per the same report, anyone in the affected area will need to boil their water until officials give the all-clear, a standard precaution anytime a water system loses pressure and risks contamination.
No Link to Center Township's E. Coli Advisory
The timing happens to coincide with a separate water concern just across the river. Center Township was under its own boil-water advisory due to an E. coli outbreak, the station noted, but it drew a clear line between the two situations: there is no known relation between the Center Township advisory and the one now in effect in Conway.
That distinction matters for anyone trying to piece together what's going on with water systems in the area, since Conway Borough and Center Township are dealing with entirely separate problems traced to entirely separate causes.
A Borough With a History of Water Headaches
This isn't the first time Conway's taps have gone dry. A previous water main break on Second Avenue triggered a boil-water advisory covering the stretch from 5th Avenue to Route 65; crews eventually fixed that break and restored service, though, as CBS News Pittsburgh reported at the time, the advisory itself stayed in place even after the water came back.
In another earlier episode, the borough announced it had lifted a precautionary downtown boil-water advisory once testing came back clean. “The precautionary boil water advisory for the downtown area is over. All the testings have come back negative,” the borough said, according to Beaver County Radio.
Infrastructure work has also forced planned outages before. A prior waterline replacement project was set to begin along 10th Street and 3rd Avenue, with the borough warning it might need to fully shut off water and offering no completion timeframe, per a separate WTAE report. Around a similar stretch of work, downtown Conway was also scheduled to go without water from 7 p.m. to 5 a.m. on three consecutive nights, according to a report carried by Yahoo News.
There's no evidence tying those earlier incidents to Wednesday's break to a shared cause — they're documented as separate events. For now, residents between 1st and 5th avenues are left waiting on word from the borough about when their water will flow again, and boiling it once it does.
