ST CHARLES, Mo. – As of late Monday afternoon, a 25-foot stretch of North Main Street in St. Charles remains closed due to a water main break that happened Sunday evening. Crews are working around-the-clock to repair the break and fill the hole before Fourth of July weekend. Until then, businesses will still operate.

“I didn’t know when I got the phone call this morning how catastrophic it would be,” said Joe Ancmon, the owner of Novellus and Burger Underground, two restaurants that sit on Main between Jefferson and Monroe streets, where the break happened.

For hours, water rushed through the streets of the city. By early evening on Monday, little water remained. Nick Galla, the director of Public Works for St. Charles, explained that the 100-year-old cast-iron pipeline was part of the reason the break happened.

“The age of the infrastructure, plus the excessive heat we have going on,” he said.

What makes the situation more complicated, is that there’s sand underneath the bricks that fill Main Street. Due to the water and moisture that seeped into parts of the road, many of the bricks had to be completely uprooted and cleaned before replacing them.

“The sand is really wet…each brick has to be cleaned off,” Galla said.

Removing, cleaning, and replacing hundreds of those bricks is what had bright shirts and yellow tape filling that stretch of the street.

“They’ve got more people than I knew working for the city down here scraping bricks and trying to get it ready for Main Street,” said Ancmon.

From the giant hole in the road to side streets now swept with hundreds of bricks, it’s a job Galla describes as “very labor intensive.”

He explained that their crewmen have a lot of experience working on Main Street, and understand how to properly restore and replace the brick roadway.

For many like Ancmon, preserving the beauty and history of Main Street is essential for the livelihood of the area.

“Main Street has to be the crown jewel of the entire St. Charles City,” he said.

A sentiment shared by many business owners along the city’s historic district. And it’s why, despite the odd circumstances, so many businesses opted to stay open, despite the hurdle—or hole—in the road.

“If you break some eggs, you make an omelet,” Ancmon said.

Particularly in a part of the city as popular as Main Street.

“Part of the historic charm of Main Street is preserving the aesthetics,” Galla said.

Galla said circumstances like these are causing the city to consider new ways of reducing the severity of water main breaks.

“We’re trying to add more valves, so when there is a water main break, we’re able to isolate those,” he said.

Something that could be necessary as big summer weekends and holidays continue to approach.

As of Monday, traffic continued to move by just fine through stretches of Main Street, however, the area between Jefferson and Monroe will remain closed to traffic until at least Wednesday, with full repairs, according to city officials, wrapping up by this weekend. In the meantime, if you’d like to grab a bite to eat along that stretch, you’ll have to search for somewhere else to park.

Galla said while the north end’s brick road was recently updated in the early 2000s, it’s now the south side that could use a renovation.