SYRACUSE, N.Y. -- This is not the way a prime street in downtown Syracuse is supposed to look. But a crack in a 24 inch main created a canal along East Onondaga Street, flooding basements of some buildings and creating a headache for city work crews. And in a city with piping that was placed in the ground when Benjamin Harrison was President, it is nothing new.

“As the pipe ages, like anything, it wears. Ground and water movement cause problems with underground infrastructure,” said Vince Esposito, who is with the Syracuse Department of Public Works.

The city keeps watch over the maze of pipes and conduits running under its streets carrying everything from water and sewage to electricity and gas to cable and fiber optics. It searches for leaks, maintains what it can, replaces pipes and sewers in small sections, but for the most part, crews wait for the breaks and fix them.

“It's what you might term reactionary. We have to react to breaks when they happen,” Esposito said.

One answer to a leaky set of 100-year-old-plus pipes is to just replace them all. But the cost and the disruption of life in the city are deemed unacceptable. The cost? For sewers alone, it's about $500 a foot to replace them.

“Per foot,” Esposito said. “That's with engineering costs and restoration costs.”

Figure the water pipes cost about the same and figure there are 500 miles of water pipes and 500 miles of sewers and you're looking at a project price tag of more than $2.5 billion. And that doesn't even figure in the cost of disruptions from digging up every street in the city.

“To rebuild the whole city would not only take a lot of money, it would take a lot of time and a lot of manpower,” said Esposito.

So when it comes to scenes like this, get used to it.

As the repairs are completed and water is turned back on for businesses in the area, the health department is issuing a boil water advisory through May 16th.