Water service has now been restored to the historic mountain city of Victor, Colorado, after nearly a week of outages tied to catastrophic failures in the city's aging water system.
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City officials confirmed Tuesday afternoon that water had been successfully recharged into Victor's system after emergency repairs and line flushing efforts. However, residents are still under a boil water order while crews continue testing and monitoring for additional failures.
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Construction on water system in Victor.
CBS
For residents and businesses, the return of running water marks the end of a brutal stretch that began Thursday when crews attempting to replace a water main removed dirt underneath the line, which was the only thing supporting the line. That started a long line of attempts to fix it, then adapt to new issues each attempted fix brought.
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"During that time, we found another main failure," said City Administrator Bobby Tech. "Unfortunately, as we were going through this, we realized there are additional failures and those failures begin to compound."
According to the city, Victor lost an estimated 500,000 to 600,000 gallons of water during the crisis, roughly 15 times the city's normal daily usage of 30,000 to 40,000 gallons. The outage impacted around 420 water taps serving roughly 300-350 homes.
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Tech explained Victor's water infrastructure dates back decades, and in some places, more than a century.
"Victor was a boomtown in the 1890s and early 1900s," Tech said. "So we're still finding sometimes clay and wooden pipes."
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Sign on a Victor business announcing closure due to water outage.
CBS
The crisis escalated Sunday when the city declared a local emergency and brought in additional crews and resources from across Colorado. Officials say that when pressure was restored to the system, more weak points in the old infrastructure began to fail.
