Cambridge water main floods from cast iron pipe failure

Tom describes water main repair crews shattering 100-year-old cast iron mains with a sledgehammer — illustrating both cast iron brittleness and the longevity of legacy infrastructure. Connects to recurring corpus theme of aging Boston/Cambridge buried infrastructure.

Have you ever seen the water main guys repairing a leak? They get down in the hole, uncover this big cast iron water main, and when they need to cut it out, they don't have to saw it — they just take a sledgehammer and hit it. It just shatters. That's what carries our water, and that's why you have big floods in Cambridge. Some of those cast iron pipes are 100 years old. So they've gotten a fair amount of service.