A water main break caused a downtown Chapel Hill road to close for much of Thursday.

An alert shared by the Chapel Hill Police Department warned community members of a water main break along West Rosemary Street at 7:53 a.m. Traffic was stopped in both directions along the road between Church Street and Mitchell Lane, and police encouraged road-users to detour by using Franklin Street.

The Orange Water and Sewer Authority quickly began repairs after the break was noticed. A spokesperson for the agency later told Chapelboro the break was not caused by OWASA’s ongoing West Rosemary Street water main replacement project, as the break happened “deep under the street, where digging had not occurred.” Repairs are expected to take hours, with OWASA targeting for them to be finished and have the road reopened by 8 p.m. on Thursday.

While OWASA said only two addresses are directly impacted by the break, one of those is the apartment building Shortbread Lofts at 333 West Rosemary Street. Once repairs are finished, those customers will be under a boil water advisory for 18 hours as the water is tested for any contaminants that may have entered the stream during the repair process.

The area of the water main break overlaps with the work area of OWASA contractors, who are preparing for an extensive water main replacement along the length of West Rosemary Street. The agency will be replacing more than 3,500 feet of the ductile iron pipe running the length of the road from the Carrboro town line to Chapel Hill’s Columbia Street — largely because of its tendency to suffer breaks like Thursday’s. Before this full closure, crews shut down West Rosemary Street to one lane of traffic from North Merritt Mill Road to Andrews Lane this week as workers began to connecting customers to a temporary water line constructed to provide water when the main line replacement begins in 2026.

 

Featured photo by the Town of Chapel Hill.

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