Crews were able to patch a hole left when a water main broke on Cameron Street in Raleigh's Village District Monday, allowing traffic to flow again by the evening rush hour.
Cameron Street was closed from Daniels Street to Woodburn Street from about 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. when crews finished a temporary fix.
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Water gushed from the break onto the street for hours, but, a City of Raleigh spokeswoman said, water service was preserved to nearby customers and no businesses or homes suffered any disruption in their water service.
While the restaurants and shops above ground are relatively new, the pipes serving that part of the city date to WWII.
"This is about the service life we would expect of those lines," said Ed Buchan, assistant director of Raleigh Water. "They’re starting to break pretty much anytime right now."
While the road was open to traffic with a stopgap fix Monday evening, crews will return to replace the asphalt on Tuesday," Buchan said.
He expects technology to help predict future breaks before they happen, and suggest where maintenance should be a priority.
"We’ve got machine learning tools that we use to try to predict that. It’s looking at material age, the soils around it, all sorts of different factors that can impact that. We’re trying to better understand where those breaks might happen and try to get ahead of it," Buchan said.