The city’s message went out at 10:48 Thursday morning, in English and Spanish, with three photos of a wet street: emergency water shutdown on Shurtleff Street, from Marginal Street to Essex Street, main break. That was the whole announcement. There has been no follow-up saying when the water came back on, how many buildings lost it, or what broke.
For the people on that stretch of Shurtleff it was an inconvenience of a few hours, or a day. For the rest of the city it is a reminder of something the numbers have been saying for years: Chelsea’s water pipes are old, and a lot of them are the kind that break.
What is under the street
Chelsea does not treat its own water. Every drop comes from the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority’s reservoirs in the western part of the state, through the MWRA’s big transmission mains, and into about 56 miles of city-owned pipe ranging from six to twenty inches across. That local network is the city’s responsibility, and the city’s own description of it, in the water quality letter it sends residents, is blunt. Upwards of 70 percent of the mains are more than 50 years old. An estimated 47 percent are unlined cast iron.
Unlined cast iron is the pipe that breaks. It corrodes from the inside, it gets brittle, and it fails when the ground shifts, when the temperature swings, or when a heavy truck rolls over a weak spot. Shurtleff and Marginal sit inside the downtown residential historic district, which is another way of saying the streets and what is under them were laid out a long time ago.
The city has been chipping at the problem. In 2023 it replaced the old cast iron under Willow Street, Watts Street and Central Avenue with larger, cement-lined ductile iron. The downtown Broadway reconstruction included about 1,300 feet of new main and 850 feet of lead service line replacement. Since 2018 the city has run a program to replace every remaining lead service pipe at no cost to the property owner. The most recent lead test the city published put the 90th percentile at 8.29 parts per billion, under the federal action level of 15, but not zero.
Money for this kind of work usually comes through the MWRA, which has lent its member communities $621 million interest-free since 1998 to clean, line or replace about 632 miles of pipe. How much of that Chelsea has drawn, and what the current five-year capital plan budgets for water mains, are questions the city’s website could answer if it were reachable from here this week; it was not.
The pattern
This is not the first time. In December 2010 a 16-inch main that was 108 years old let go at Beacon Street and Broadway at two in the morning and took out water for about 200 customers. That break got television coverage. Thursday’s did not, which is probably a fair measure of its size. But the pipe that broke Thursday is, statistically, likely to be a sibling of the one that broke in 2010.
Two things would help residents the next time. One is a follow-up message when the water is restored, and a line on whether a boil order applies. The city sent neither on Thursday, at least not on the channel it used to announce the shutdown. The other is a public map or list of which streets have been re-piped and which are still on cast iron. The city has the data. It uses it to plan the work. Residents on the old streets would like to know they are on the old streets.
If your water was off Thursday and came back cloudy or brown, that is normal after a main repair. Run the cold tap until it clears. If it does not clear in a few minutes, call the Water and Sewer Division at City Hall.