AUBURN — City crews planned to have a broken water main fixed and reopen High Street at Minot Avenue late Monday night.

“It all depends on the conditions we find underground, but we hope we’ll be able to wrap things up,” Auburn Water District Superintendent John Storer said.

Storer said the water leak was discovered about 3:50 a.m. Monday in an 8-inch water line under High Street at the Minot Avenue intersection. Storer said crews discovered that an 8-foot-long section of the pipe had ruptured, splitting completely in half.

“It was some kind of catastrophic failure,” Storer said. “We were losing like 7,000 to 8,000 gallons of water a minute.”

The water didn’t run up on the road but stayed under the pavement, undermining High Street and the railroad tracks from below.

“We started digging on the asphalt, and there was a huge void,” he said. “The jackhammer just fell right in.”

Storer said he expected crews would have the ruptured pipe replaced by 5 p.m. Monday and the hole refilled by 10 p.m.

 “Obviously we can’t make a permanent pavement repair at this time of the year without any hot-mix asphalt available, so motorists should be cautioned to proceed carefully through the area once it is reopened,” Storer said in an e-mail.

Storer said he contacted Guilford, the rail line’s owners to notify them of the break and the undermining. They had canceled all traffic on that line but reopened it by 3 p.m. Monday. Storer said the water district provided the railroad crushed stone to help support the train tracks.

Storer said he doubted that weather caused the break.

“Water line breaks can be fairly random events,” Storer said. “The weather was not excessively cold, and we can’t trace it to a pump failure or other man-made issues. I think this is one of those things that happened — and it just so happened on the tail end of a major storm.”

But Storer said the weather will slow down crews working to repair the line and reopen the intersection.

“It made it tough to locate the valves to shut down the line,” he said. “And I always worry about crews working on slippery roads during storms like this.”

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