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 The latest breakdown, a massive water main rupture in the wealthy suburb of Montgomery County, Md., has closed hundreds of restaurants and left tens of thousands of people scrambling for clean drinking water.
The rupture follows a series of recent disruptions for Washington area residents, including a blackout in downtown Washington, a Metro subway train derailment and track damage caused by the heat.
Health officials in Montgomery County rushed Tuesday to notify more than 800 restaurants that they must remain closed until water is deemed safe, which could take days. Water was restored Monday to tens of thousands of residents and businesses, but the Washington Suburban Sanitation Commission, the eighth-largest water utility in the country, warned them to boil tap water before drinking it.
At a McDonald's in Gaithersburg, puzzled drivers circled the drivethru, wondering why it was closed.
Restaurant owners like Brian Marshall, owner of Outta the Way Cafe in Derwood, were left wondering how long the county's order to close their businesses might last.
"We're going shift by shift," he said.
Just down the road, Hever Lizama, owner of Biscotti Ristorante Italiano, said he could have boiled pasta in bottled water and wondered if the restrictions were really necessary.
"Where I come from, people drink dirty water every day," said Lizama, originally from El Salvador.
Officials with the sanitation commission say they believe the rupture was caused by corroded wiring inside the pipe. It went unnoticed for hours.
The commission has warned that its system is aging, overtaxed and underfunded. It now serves 1.8 million suburban Maryland customers and it has had an increasing number of water main breaks, including a record 2,129 last year.
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 Nationwide, the pipes that carry drinking water are aging and in need of repair, according to recent government estimates. Major breaks have occurred this year in cities like Chicago and Denver, spilling millions of gallons of water, cutting service and opening up yawning sinkholes on city streets and highways.
"It's almost like out-of-sight, out-of-mind," said Michele Quander-Collins, spokeswoman for the District of Columbia Water and Sewer Authority, which serves the White House, Congress and the rest of the city. "You've got this complex network of pipes
-- an amazing engineering feat -- but it's underground and forgotten until something happens."
Some pipes in Washington proper date back to the 1850s, and about 88 percent of the water system there is made of cast iron. The city has had a steady stream of water main breaks in recent years, including 501 in the most recent fiscal year and more than 240 since October.
"What we've seen in the Washington area in the last couple of weeks underscores what a lot of folks have been warning for some time," said David Robertson, executive director of the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments. "We don't have a good policy or funding mechanism in place in America or the national capital region to invest in infrastructure."
[Associated
Press; By BRETT ZONGKER]
Associated Press writer Stephen Manning in Rockville and Sarah Karush in Gaithersburg contributed to this report.
Copyright 2008 The Associated
Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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