Water service restored, boil advisory issued after pipe breaks in McColl

MCCOLL, S.C. (WBTW) — A water pipe broke in the town of McColl, causing the town to shut down its water Monday morning.

Mayor George Garner told News13 that the water was back on Monday night and that the town was under a boil water advisory.

McColl Elementary Middle School and Marlboro County High School had an E-learning day because of the outage.

The pipe broke in front of a home on Gospel Street on Sunday night. Just last week, McColl Elementary Middle School students were dismissed early because of another broken pipe.

“Everything’s so old, they’re probably 200, 300 years old,” Jamie Grooms said. “I mean since the town’s been built, that’s when they’ve been here.”

Grooms lives nearby and works for Duke Energy. He said he wasn’t surprised by the water outage.

“There’s nothing you can really do. Because truthfully, if we’d known it was going to happen before it happened, we would’ve fixed it way before that,” he said. “The only way you’re going to fix this problem is redo the whole lines down here. All the lines in this area here need to be redone.”

Garner was also out working on the pipes Monday morning. He said the town is working to use grant money to eventually replace the pipes.

Garner said he initially tried to only shut off water for a few homes, but that it took longer to try to find the one valve than just shutting all of the water off. Both he and Grooms said this caused an inconvenience for some locals.

“Everybody’s mad because some people had to stay out of work because they couldn’t take their showers this morning, brush their teeth and all that there,” Grooms said. “But some things, you don’t know. You never know what’s going to happen.”

Garner said after the water is turned back on, there will need to be a boil water advisory until the water is retested from the stop in flow.