The hot and cold water pipes broke in one of the third floor apartment bathrooms over A Silver Lining jewelry store in downtown Boothbay Harbor on January 8 in the early afternoon.

“It was just pouring out of the ceiling, and coming through the fans,” said Tony Heyl, owner of A Silver Lining. “We didn't know what was going on. Thank God we were open; I can't bear to think of what would have happened had we not been here.”

When the water started coming down, Bonnie Stover of Boothbay had just walked in the door to pick up a ring. “I heard Tony say there was water coming out of the camera near his office,” Stover said.

“We were standing there with out mouths open, gawking, and had no idea what to do,” employee Susan Foss said. “Not Bonnie, she leapt into action and ran next door to Coastal Maine Popcorn to get some buckets and we started putting them underneath the dripping areas.”

When owners of Coastal Maine Popcorn Paul and Julie Roberts saw the flood, they jumped to help, lending more containers to help catch the water.

“Without Paul and Julie, this would have been a disaster,” Heyl said. “I'm so thankful to them.”

“I did what anyone would do,” Julie Roberts said. “It's nothing they wouldn't do for me if something happened to us.”

Foss called Betty Maddocks, who owns the building with husband Sewall Maddocks, to tell her there was a flood. She arrived in five minutes.

“There was water flowing down outside of the building, through the ceiling, everywhere,” said Betty Maddocks, who was able to shut the water off.

“Betty was so upset when she came in,” Stover said. “The whole thing took place in about half an hour's time, all of us running around. I never did pick up my ring, of course. That's an errand for another day.”

Heyl said they used a lot of paper towels. “I think Bounty stock went up 5 percent that day,” Heyl said. “We were ... trying to keep the water off the wooden cases. Some of them are 200 years old and they could have cracked.”

The extent of the damage caused by the broken pipes is not fully known yet, and the Maddockses won't know until the Servpro team can properly assess the situation.

“They need to get into the walls and see if there is electrical damage,” Heyl said. “Which means we need to move everything out of here ... all the jewelry, the cases, the grandfather clocks ... this is going to be a huge project. It's overwhelming right now.”

A plumber has already repaired the pipes, and the apartment directly underneath the bathroom is currently unoccupied. According to two tenants of the building, the ceiling inside the apartment has collapsed, but the other apartments appear undamaged.