Road crews close to completing year-long water main break repairs

CENTER CITY - Road crews were hard at work on Sansom Street and Juniper Street in Center City Friday making the area start to look like its old self again, following a massive water main break nearly a year ago.

"It looks like they've made a lot of progress in the last week," Rachel Gellene said.

The bustling business has become a hot spot for traffic jams ever since the crater first opened in 2018.

"This block gets very congested, especially late at night when the bars are getting out. It's like a 13 minute Uber wait," Gellene said.

Time Bar and Restaurant has managed to keep people coming through it’s doors and entertained while various utilities have done their repair work, but they have taken hits at times.

“Probably what we notice it the most is happy hour because honestly if you are coming from any of these other streets you have to pass about 80 bars," Zach Sprague said.

Philadelphia Water Department says it actually finished their main repair work back in November, but agencies like PECO and PGW still had to do their repairs.

“What took so long is it was incredibly disruptive and damaging. The night of July 3rd we had a 48 inch water main break, property damage, just the damage to the city," said Water Department spokesman Jon Digiulio.

The good news is that Digiulio says the end is in sight.

“We have a couple street lights we need to put up and we’re really close to the finish line.”