SHERBURN — Depending on schedules and personalities, Christmas Eve can be a hectic time of last-minute shopping, traveling or cooking, or a calm, relaxing time of quiet reflection before the hustle and bustle of the next day’s celebrations.

However, as residents of Sherburn recently learned, the holidays also can throw in an unexpected curve ball.

A water main break left the city without water for most of the day Sunday. With the combination of weekend and holiday, people could have been forgiven for a bit of pre-Christmas panic. However, the prevailing atmosphere was a calm one, and the break was fixed as fast as humanly possible thanks to some dedicated workers at Beemer Companies of Fairmont. Sherburn City Administrator Brad Hughes was able to discuss how the situation developed.

“This is the time of when these things happen,” he said. “There was just a shift in the ground or something like that. It was discovered that there was no water when the alarms went off at the water plant for the water tower being drained out at about 4 o’clock in the morning.”

Hughes said the water was off for the majority of the day, and not restored until just before 7 p.m. Once the water was finally restored, the city asked that residents boil any water they planned to drink.

“That was just a precaution,” he noted. “In all likelihood, there were no issues, but when you have a water main break like that it’s a good precaution once you have the lines charged to make sure that nothing got in there to contaminate it.”

On Wednesday afternoon, Hughes shared that results had come in showing that necessary water tests came back clear, and the boiling recommendation was lifted. Hughes also noted the city was pleased with residents’ patience throughout the whole situation.

“We had a lot of positive comments from the residents,” he said. “They knew that we were working on getting it fixed, and I kept them updated with alerts on text messages and posts on Facebook, and there were updates on both the police and city Facebook pages on how things were progressing and what our timeline was. For the most part I didn’t get any negative comments and people weren’t getting upset, so that was really appreciated.”

In a post on the company’s Facebook page, Beemer Companies issued a thank you to the workers who gave up their Christmas Eve to fix the break. In addition to Sherburn, the post also mentioned there was another water main break in Northrop that day. Water for both cities was back up and running that same evening.