Two and a half weeks after a major failure of the building’s well cut off water service to the Town Hall Annex, select board members still don’t have a lot of answers and are planning the town’s next step in responding to the crisis:

“We’ve all been put in a hard spot,” select board member Richard Mundy said Monday evening. “Two weeks without any water ... solutions not great, and tenants affected, including children.”

Town officials are waiting on a study ihto what exactly happened with the well, which chairwoman Shana Teas said suffered a “catastrophic” failure over the last few days of September. The well is only a few years old, dug about 10 feet away from an older decommissioned well.

Board members heard about the failure on Friday, Sept. 30, and by then town administrator Chris Vitale had already been in contact with Mass DEP, a licensed plumber and the department of health. Temporary porta-johns were installed and portable cisterns were brought in to supply water, though it is not potable. Currently, bottled drinking water is being provided for drinking.

The failure disrupted business in the town’s municipal offices housed in the building, as well as the Codimonk Nursery School, which leases out space in the basement.

A Codimonk staffer said the school has brought in a portable sink and has portable facilities for its workers and just over a dozen students, and said they’re just waiting to see what happens like everyone else:

“They are supplying us with water so right now we’re good,” she said. “We’re just holding out, waiting for answers.”

At Monday night’s meeting, Mundy suggested moving annex offices and the nursery school over to the old high school, which can currently support those services under code.

He reasoned that throwing money after water, a new well and other work that needs to be done at the aging building doesn’t make sense, given all of its other deficiencies.

Other members didn’t disagree, but to a point — while Jake McGuigan said “this building does not function as an office space” and is “failing,” he and others said  now might not be the time to start moving everything over to the high school.

For one, the state of that building’s well is not yet known, Teas said. For another, there is no word back yet from engineers on the state of the Annex well and what it will take to fix it.

“I don’t think we have enough information,” Teas said. “In theory (moving everything) is a good idea. But for me it’s a matter of timing. We don’t have the evaluation on the cost of moving these offices, and then we need better information about what the potential for the old high school is. We need to know what the well’s going to cost ... I don’t think we’re going to be able to pull off a move” right now.

Instead, board members will be in contact with Vitale and are awaiting a well report due the first week of November.