Water began gushing out from below Coulter Avenue on Wednesday evening, after a water main ruptured. The break turned the highway into something of a water feature, with geysers of water shooting up through the cracks in the road.

Fixing the leak required cutting into the road surface and closing the highway between Bent and Clark streets. The section remained closed on Thursday morning while City of Powell crews — who spent all of Wednesday night working at the site — repaired the road. The route reopened to travelers on Thursday afternoon, though with a portion of the turn lane and inside westbound lane blocked off due to the hole in the road.

Unlike most city streets, that portion of Coulter Avenue/U.S. Highway 14A is made of concrete, “so it’s thick,” said City Administrator Zack Thorington. “[It] took them a while to … jackhammer through it, and, of course, [there’s] rebar in it, and stuff like that. But they got it.”

The ordeal isn’t over, however: A valve located near the Cellular Plus store to the west also started leaking and was sending a more modest stream of water up into the road on Thursday.

While the leak is much smaller than Wednesday’s “geyser” created by the broken water, that “doesn’t mean it can’t turn into something bigger,” Thorington said.

The city is trying to find a new valve for the 10-inch water line as quickly as possible, but he said it’s possible one won’t arrive until Tuesday. Whenever the crews have a replacement in hand, they’ll again have to cut into the highway to make the switch, likely leading to more disruptions to highway traffic.

Thorington believed the repair work on Wednesday’s break required some limited outages, but that city personnel were generally able to reroute water and avoid disruptions to service.

The break occurred before 5 p.m. Wednesday, and water department personnel “worked their butts off” at the site until 5 a.m. Thursday, Thorington said. Other departments also leant a hand.

It was all part of a busy week for city crews in the downtown area, as the streets department has separately been working to remove some trees and replace uneven sidewalks on Bent Street.