Authorities try to fix a pipe that leaked water and created a huge hole on a street in Ho Chi Minh City

A water pipe breach created a large hole on Nguyen Dinh Chieu Street in Ho Chi Minh City on Wednesday.

Local residents said there was a small hole at the spot since 5p.m. on Tuesday and they had to help pull a taxi out after it got stuck in it when trying to park nearby.

A xe om (motorbike taxi) driver in the area was quoted by Vietnamnet as saying: “The hole [on Tuesday evening] was only the size of a hand and no one thought that it could become so huge.”

Local residents said the water spurted like a waterfall in the middle of the city.

Officials from the Ben Thanh Water Supply Company arrived around one and a half hours later and stopped the water at around 9a.m. They also fenced the hole. Larger parts of the road further down the spot could have been affected by the breach, they said.

Nguyen Van Gat, a maintenance official with the company, said the “the pipe was too old.”

Gat said the pipeline will be repaired in a day or two. The pipeline carried water to hundreds of families on Dinh Tien Hoang and Mac Dinh Chi Streets.

In related news, a broken pipe at the Dong Khoi-Le Thanh Ton intersection several days ago was fixed on Wednesday.

A similar accident on November 16 had punctured two 1.5×1.5 meter and 1.5×1.7 meter holes that were about two meters deep on Road 25B, the busy route connecting Cat Lai Port with downtown HCMC.

The water formed a 30 square-meter cave underground and hundreds of families were cut off from water supply for days.

To Trung Dung, office chief of Saigon Water Corp. (Sawaco) that manages more than 3,800 kilometers of water pipes in the city, blamed other underground projects such as drainage or power wire installation for damaging the water pipeline, the Vietnamnet reported.

Dung admitted that the pipe system was old, but added contractors were only willing to install new pipes, not repair old ones. Sawaco could not afford to install new pipe systems, he said.

Around 700 kilometers of pipes in the city have been used for more than 30 years.

Source: Thanh Nien