South Street Project in Williamstown Leads to Utility Outages
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. – Two utility outages in as many days last week related to the South Street road reconstruction had town officials double- and triple-checking service maps.
But they also realize that those maps are not perfect.
Twenty-four hours after road crews hit a gas line that caused “a heavy odor of natural gas around Field Park,” according to a social media post by the local police, a water main break caused water to be shut off from the start of South Street north to Field Park.
In both instances, service was restored within a couple of hours.
The two incidents had slightly different origins, the town manager said on Friday.
“The gas line they hit was mapped correctly, and they just managed to hit it,” Robert Menicocci said. “It’s highly undesirable, but it’s not uncommon in that these things happen during construction.
“The water line, from what I understand, it wasn’t mapped, so that’s not on the contractor as much.”
Actually, the line was on the map, just not where it was supposed to be.
“When you go back hundreds of years, things aren’t exactly where you think they’re going to be,” Menicocci said. “You find that all the time, things are plus or minus many feet.”
Since the water main break occurred during regular business hours, the town was able to handle it without any overtime cost for its Department of Public Works crew, he said. Any charges from Berkshire Gas to repair the gas line break will be worked out between the utility and the contractor and its insurer.
And the outages did not result in significant time lost on the South Street project, which is causing one-way traffic flow on the road throughout the 2025 construction season.
Menicocci said that the project is on or ahead of schedule and that everyone is “hitting their benchmarks” for the rebuild.
As for last week’s back-to-back emergencies, the town manager said he was “ready to scream” when he heard about the water main break coming on the heels of the gas line. But he quickly understood there was no negligence involved.
“In this particular instance, we’re going back through and taking a look at all the [water line] maps again to make sure there isn’t anything we might encounter,” he said. “But, again, I’d say it isn’t great, but it is the nature of the beast that with water and sewer infrastructure, there might be something unknown there. Hopefully, we’ve got it all mapped out, but if we discover something else, it wouldn’t be 100 percent in terms of a surprise. But we’re taking another look at everything just in case.”
