Staff photo / Dan Pompili An Aqua Ohio repair crew works to fix a water main break along Southwoods Avenue early Tuesday afternoon. The workers said they had been attending to breaks all over Mahoning County since 5 a.m. As of 6 p.m., crews were attending to at least eight breaks across the county. No service interruptions occurred and no boil alerts were issued.

BOARDMAN — Extreme cold means water line breaks, and Aqua Ohio had crews responding all over Mahoning County on Tuesday.

As of 6 p.m., the company was attending to eight water main breaks, said spokesman Jeff Larue, but he could not say exactly where they occurred. At least two happened in Boardman — one along Southwoods Avenue between Market Street and Glenwood Avenue, and another on Parkside Drive. Repair workers also mentioned a break in Struthers, and said they had been working on the breaks since 5 a.m.

“There are no widespread outages, and all repairs are going on while the pipes remain in service. We have not issued any boil alerts,” Larue said. “As you can imagine, it’s a pretty miserable time to be a field services worker, getting wet in negative temperatures like these.”

Larue said that when deep freezes occur, the ground shifts and pipes often do not shift with it.

“We expect to see more breaks over the next couple days, and we’ll probably have to finish one and go right on to the next,” he said. “We prioritize them based on the number of customers that could be affected and if it creates a safety concern like icing on a roadway.”

Larue said the ground will shift again when it starts to thaw, and while it will not be as bad as during a deep freeze, there will be water main breaks then, too.

As for road safety, he said repair teams will work with local road crews to salt the area to prevent the water from icing and direct the water to a nearby storm sewer until the repair is complete.