Water from the break flows onto the black city street. Somewhere, a phone rings, a contractor is roused from sleep by the news of a water-main break.

In the city that never sleeps, the pipes are old and cold and its water-main workers are urban warriors - on call around the clock.

"It's a productive job," says Abbas Bhenam, a 42-year-old civil engineer who's been working around the city on water mains, gas pipes and other underground piping problems for 14 years.

There are eight men on Bhenam's team. Ivan Cancel, 37, is the ham of the group; he loves to reveal the job's battle scars. Cancel, who has been fixing pipes for 16 years, dreams of retiring in Puerto Rico, which he left 25 years ago.

For now, he lives with his wife and four kids in Jamaica, Queens, and like the other men, works about 50 hours a week. He says the job is mostly good fun, except for the occasional brush with danger.

"We enjoy it only until we run into gas lines," he says from his post on 125th Street and 12th Avenue on a recent winter Friday. In February, Cancel was cutting a gas line that Con Edison confirmed was not in use. Luckily an explosion was avoided because his electric saw -which emits sparks- "accidentally shut off" moments before gas began spurting from the pipe, Cancel says.

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