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Water was restored to Wichita Heights High School, Stucky Middle School and a sector of north Wichita on Friday afternoon after two broken valves caused a daylong outage.
Joe Pajor, Wichita’s deputy director for public works and utilities, said the leak – a main break involving a tap off a 20-inch line found Thursday and another leaky valve discovered early Friday – left the schools and about 350 customers without water between 45th and 53rd streets north. Residents south of 45th Street also reported being without water.
Service was restored to the schools by 1:10 p.m., Pajor said. City crews immediately began refilling the line, which was drained overnight, and by 3:30 p.m., “we should have been back to full pressure,” he said.
Heights and Stucky held classes despite the outage – district crews hauled in water for drinking and to flush toilets, school officials said – although the high school’s child care center, which requires running water to operate, was closed.
Pajor said that as of Friday, city crews were working to repair eight other water leaks around the city, but none was expected to “adversely affect the service of customers.”
