Broken hydrant spills water onto Upper East Side streets

NEW YORK (WABC) -- A broken fire hydrant dumped thousands of gallons of water onto a block on the Upper East Side late Wednesday morning.

It broke around 10:50 a.m., and the water shot across 74th Street at Lexington Avenue for nearly an hour as firefighters struggled to no avail to shut off the spout.

The water appeared to be going toward a storm drain, but it took crews awhile to fix the situation.

It happened after an MTA work crew had hooked up a garden hose to the hydrant, to get water to mix with cement.

But as doorman Nick Zeno watched, something snapped.

"They plugged in the hose here and when they went to turn it off they stripped it somehow and it wouldn't turn off," he said.

The transit crew has been restoring the emergency exits from the 6 train that runs under the avenue.

For awhile they stood around watching the firefighters try to fix the problem. Then they started putting away the garden hose, and they weren't too happy to be on camera.

The MTA says it did not need a permit for the job, and that it was a simple mistake.

When firefighters couldn't stop the flow, and found an emergency shutoff valve in the street had been previously paved over, there was nothing to do but wait for the DEP.

Three hours later they arrived and shut down water service to the entire block.

Restaurant owner Angelo Vivolo, whose entire lunch business simply washed away, wonders if the Transit Authority will get anything more than a slap on the wrist.

"If I did something like that as a business they would be all over me for correcting it immediately. And this has taken really much too long," Vivolo said.

The DEP could not tell us how much water was wasted. Their workers were delayed, because they'd been dealing with a different water main break elsewhere in the city.

Amazingly the sewer on the corner was able to handle all that water and so there never was a flood.