Water Division Data

Water Main Restoration

The Water Division is charged with providing an uninterrupted supply of high quality drinking water to City residents and businesses. 

The Water Main Restoration Dashboard tracks and displays the percentage of water main restorations taking less than 8 hours to put back in service after isolating the main for repairs. 

The Water Division has a goal of restoring 80% of water mains called out of service for emergency repair incidents in less than 8 hours.

Water main issues that require emergency repairs can be complex and require initial investigation to determine what is really happening underground, often in areas where there are multiple water mains running alongside other utilities such as communications, electric, natural gas, and sewer. Once the issue has been identified by an inspector, a repair crew must be dispatched, site conditions verified, valves operated to minimize impacts for damage while maintaining service and public health, site safety set up to protect our employees and the public, and utility locates called in prior to excavation. Then the water main is isolated for repairs, beginning the timer for this metric.

Challenges in isolating the main to allow for these repairs can be complicated when isolation valves are inoperable due to failure. Furthermore, restoration of the water main can sometimes result in additional water main leaks, breaks within the isolation due to the condition of the main, and the stresses associated with isolation and restoration.

To mitigate these issues and improve water service reliability, the Water Division is undertaking a Water Master Plan project and developing an aggressive plan to renew and replace water mains and valves in the distribution system. The plan is based on a data driven condition assessment using a water main break model, and the application of a risk and consequence scoring system.

Active outages and recent repairs can be viewed on the Water Outages page. If you are experiencing a water outage, you can report a water problem through the Citizens' Service Bureau.

Note on Reduced Reporting Periods

The Water Division has been refining their process for tracking Water Main Breaks and ensuring consistency. Prior to December 2025, the tracking was inconsistent and at times incomplete.

A majority of the work activity currently related to water mains are emergency repairs and therefore reactive. To consistently track this work, it was determined to utilize the time from isolating the main for repairs, taking it out of service, until when the main is restored back in service after repairs have been made.