St. Clairsville Mayor Kathryn Thalman unloads a truck full of bottled water to be distributed to residents during repair of a major waterline break.

A major waterline break resulted in a “catastrophic,” but temporary, failure of St. Clairsville’s water treatment and distribution system, according to Water and Wastewater Superintendent Michael Reed.

“We had to react pretty quickly to that because it was starting to drain our water tanks. Thankfully, due to our city employees and the contractor, James White Construction, we were able to remedy the situation relatively quick and get water back into the tanks,” Reed said Wednesday.

The timing of the waterline break was unfortunate because the St. Clairsville Water and Wastewater Department had already scheduled a planned outage to tie new waterlines into the existing system in the water tank area on Wednesday. Due to Tuesday’s situation being resolved, the department decided to go forward with the planned outage.

“We had a plan in place to keep everyone having water, but what happened was when we started the process of tying the water in we started losing water pressure from the tanks. We discovered there was a problem with a water valve coming from the water plant to the water tanks not allowing us to get water to the tank,” Reed said.

To address the issue, Reed said, the department opened its backup connection with the Belmont County Water and Sewer District to push emergency water into the city. Once the emergency water started flowing in, the water and wastewater department went to work to fix the faulty valve. Due to the low water pressure that resulted from the faulty valve, a lot of city residents lost all water pressure.

In an effort to resolve the problem and restore water pressure to customers, the department kept its connection to the Belmont County Water and Sewer District open and maintained its connection to the St. Clairsville water plant to push as much water to the city’s water tanks as possible. Once pressure was restored, a boil order was issued and will remain in effect until tonight.

“Thankfully … (with) our employees’ quick reaction and their knowledge and skills, we were able to get the situation remedied. It could’ve been a lot worse. We could have lost all of the water in the city due to this situation. But thankfully we were able to react quickly and save as much water as we could,” Reed said. “I’d also like to thank the St. Clairsville City Council for all of their involvement and help.”

Elaina Moscato, executive assistant to the service director, credited everyone who helped.

“We’d also especially like to extend a special thank you to our council members for all of their help with this. We have Terra Butler and Police Officer T.J. Stewart who own the Newellstown Diner. They went and got some pallets of water for citizens that were passed out last night at the rec center. And Holly West is a council member as well, and she got Sam’s Club to donate three pallets of water and we were able to pass those out today at the rec center and behind the fire station.”

Moscato added that the distribution of the free water to residents was “a way to say thank you for your patience, and we’re here together in this and doing the best that we can.”

Mayor Kathryn Thalman also helped to pass out water. Thalman said she was contacted by Butler to come together to pass out water to residents of the city. Butler and Stewart made the suggestion to purchase a pallet of water from Rural King. Thalman said that the one pallet went so fast that they had to return to Rural King to purchase another. After the purchase of the second pallet, West contacted Thalman to inform her that Sam’s Club officials became aware of the situation and decided to donate three pallets of cases of water to be passed out to residents.

“Our team plays very well together. There’s no doubt about it. I’m proud of everybody,” Thalman said. “This could have been a lot worse.”