SCRANTON -- A broken water valve left some businesses in Scranton without any water for hours Wednesday.
Water was restored Wednesday afternoon, but the lack of it meant extra work for some employees.
A hotel, a restaurant, and two office buildings were without water for most of the day while crews from Pennsylvania American Water worked on that broken valve in downtown Scranton. For the people whose work was affected by the water outage, the real work began after the water came back on.
A broken valve behind the Radisson Lackawanna Station Hotel knocked out water service to the hotel and a few other businesses on Lackawanna Avenue.
Hotel officials cancelled lunch for the day. The workers who would normally cover lunch waited for the real work to begin.
"I would expect like any other break that there will be some colorization to the water when it comes back. So, we will have to go to every room, run all the lines in the rooms, and clean all the bathrooms and tubs and sinks again," said the hotel's General Manager Michael Kearney.
The lunch hour wasn't just shut down at the Radisson Lackawanna Station Hotel, but across the street at Kildare's Irish Pub too.
Kildare's manager Lori McDonough got the bad news when she came in to open the pub, and she had no choice but to close the restaurant for lunch time.
"We couldn't, because there was no water anywhere, and our machines were pinging because there was no water feeding into them so we had to shut everything down. I called the water company and they said there was a water main break and we would have to wait until it was restored," McDonough said.
The employees said waiting for water was like waiting for ice to melt. So, that's how they passed the time. They put left over ice on the stove to make water so employees could flush toilets in the meantime.
Over at the Radisson, the real work began when the water came back on. They had only a few hours to clean rooms before check-in time.
Officials from Pennsylvania American Water said the valve in downtown Scranton broke on Monday, and Wednesday was the second time crews tried to fix it. Crews were able to repair the valve and restore water to those businesses around 2 p.m. Wednesday.