Emergency leak cuts water to all of Redway, crews make repairs

A broken water line near the Brass Rail Bar & Grill left all of Redway without service after crews had to shut down the system to make emergency repairs, a reminder that one failure can still ripple through the entire town when old valves no longer do their job.

Redway Community Services District general manager Cody Cox discovered the problem Saturday morning while walking near the Redwood Drive business. After taking a closer look, he found that an 8-inch asbestos-cement water line had failed. Because the district’s existing isolation valves are often seized or no longer functional, crews could not cut water only to the damaged section. The result was a full-town outage instead of a smaller, contained shutdown.

That limitation is exactly what the district has been trying to fix. Cox said crews have already installed about 10 new commercial hydrants with auxiliary valves and are adding more isolation valves with T-assemblies throughout the system. The goal is straightforward: when the next break happens, workers should be able to isolate the damage faster and leave more of Redway in service. Until that network is built out, though, emergency shutdowns will remain part of life in a system still catching up with its own age.

The outage comes only about two weeks after the district posted a planned nighttime interruption for March 30, scheduled to last four hours while workers installed a new fire hydrant and new isolation valves. That repair window was designed to improve reliability and reduce future service interruptions, but it also came with a one-minute boil-water precaution for 24 hours after any pressure loss. The sequence of events underscores the district’s larger challenge: it is upgrading the system while still responding to breakdowns in the old one.

The Redway district has been warning for years that some of its mains are aging. In 2019, it said the water mains serving McKenzie Lane and Upper West Coast Road and Mill Road were old and cost the district money every year in repairs and maintenance. The break near Redwood Drive adds another concrete example of what that means for households and businesses that depend on reliable water for daily operations.

The failed pipe also fits a wider infrastructure pattern. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency background materials note that asbestos-cement pipe was widely used in the mid-1900s in potable water systems, especially in the western United States, and that many of those pipes are now reaching the end of their service life. In Redway, that larger reality showed up as an immediate local disruption, with crews working to restore service while the district continues its slow push toward a more segmented, less fragile water system.