Water shot nearly 100 feet in the air in downtown Walnut Creek about midnight on Thursday, sending an unknown number of gallons of water gushing high in the sky and down the main drag.
East Bay Municipal Utility District spokeswoman Abbie Figueroa said she thinks the built-up pressure inside the pipes at South California and Olympic boulevards blew off a cap about midnight. She said crews weren't sure if it was a 4-inch pipe or a 48-inch pipe that broke, which is why it took crews two hours to figure out the problem.
Once the problem was pinpointed, she said the actual fix was quite fast. She said it was fortunately the problem was in the smaller pipe. If it had been in the larger one, crews would have had to have been out there for longer, causing traffic headaches downtown.
No businesses were affected.
NBC Bay Area stringer Craig Cannon contributed to this report.
