Texas Water Crisis: Frozen Pipes, Cracked Wells and Offline Treatment Plants

DALLAS – Power flared up in much of Texas on Thursday, but millions across the state faced another major crisis: a lack of drinking water as pipes cracked, wells froze and water treatment plants went offline.

The problems were particularly acute in hospitals. One in Austin was forced to move some of his most critically ill patients to another building when the taps were almost dry. Another in Houston had to haul water on trucks to flush the toilets.

For many of the state’s stuck at home, however, the emergency meant boiling the tap water that was dripping through their faucets, searching the stores for bottled water, or boiling icicles and filthy snow on their stoves.

For others it meant no water at all. Denise Gonzalez, 40, joined a crowd at a makeshift relief center in a working class corner in West Dallas on Thursday, where volunteers were handing out food from the hold of a charter bus.

Back at her apartment, she said, the lights were finally on again. But their pipes were frozen solid. She couldn’t bathe, shower, or use the toilet. She said she had been calling plumbers all day but one of the few who answered told her it was $ 3,000 to assess the damage.

“If I had $ 3,000,” said Ms. Gonzalez, “I wouldn’t get food from people on the bus.”

During major disruptions in the Texas power grid this week, more than four million households were without electricity, but by Thursday evening only about 347,000 households were missing electricity. Much of the national concern had turned to water ailment.

As of Thursday, more than 800 public water systems in 162 of the state’s 254 counties had been disrupted, affecting 13.1 million people, according to a spokeswoman for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.

Harris County, which also includes Houston, the country’s fourth largest city, has over a million people affected by local water systems who have either issued advice on boiling water for safe drinking or failing to provide water at all, Brian Murray, a spokesman for the County Emergency Management Agency.

Residents of the Texas capital Austin were also asked to boil water because of a power outage at the city’s largest water treatment plant. Austin Water director Greg Meszaros said falling temperatures caused the water pipes to break and the pipes to burst, causing water consumption to increase and allowing water to leak out of the system.

He said Thursday that electricity had been restored and that restoring water supplies to hospitals and other health facilities was a priority. The city’s reservoirs, which can hold about 100 million gallons of water – or a day of water for Austin – had been nearly emptied from leaks or increased usage by residents.

“We never imagined a day when hospitals would run out of water,” he said.

For many Texans, the disturbances were a startling inconvenience that seemed to push them back into the state’s past. People hunted for firewood in suburban courtyards, trembled in dark houses, lived on canned food and did without electronics.

Others had worse consequences. At the South Austin Medical Center in St. David, officials on Wednesday evening tried to fix a heating system that was failing due to low water pressure. They were forced to find portable toilets and distribute bottles of water to patients and staff so that they could wash their hands.

In San Antonio, Jesse Singh, 58, a Shell gas station owner, said his 80-year-old father was banned from regularly scheduled dialysis treatments Tuesday and Thursday because his clinic was having problems accessing water.

“It is a dangerous situation,” said Mr Singh.

The problem was compounded by the fact that much of Texas was still experiencing cold weather and blizzards on Thursday, which was part of a devastating winter weather that also shed snow and triggered winter storm warnings in parts of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut on Friday Night.

Corey Brown, an employee of Tyler Water Utilities, which serves the city of Tyler, northeast Texas, said the temperature on Thursday was in their 20s, making water restoration efforts difficult. Mr. Brown suggested that half of the utility’s 110,000 customers were completely without water.

“They had frozen water pipes,” he said. “We have two water systems – one of which has failed and we also have power outages. And then we had a hard frost in the last few days so that many pipes freeze and that stop the flow to some people’s houses or cause low pressure. “

Days of glacial weather killed at least 38 people nationwide, made many roads impassable, disrupted vaccine distribution, and covered nearly three-quarters of the continental United States in snow. Federal Emergency Management Agency officials said they provided 60 generators “in support of critical infrastructure” in Texas and provided the state blankets, bottled water and meals.

The head of the Texas Electric Reliability Council, which operates the state’s power grid, warned Thursday that the state was “not yet out of the woods,” largely due to the persistent cold.

“We are still in very cold conditions, so we are still seeing much higher demand than normal winter,” said Bill Magness, president and chief executive officer of the council, at a press conference. This meant that planned outages could be necessary in the coming days to keep the network stable.

“If we hit a bump and have to go back a generation, we may have to ask about failures,” he said. “But if we do, we believe they’ll be at the level they could have rotating failures, not the bigger numbers we faced earlier this week.”

There were other signs of progress. Houston’s William P. Hobby Airport, which closed Wednesday due to water issues, announced early Thursday morning that it had restored water to limited capacity and that flights would resume.

But even when power flickered again for many Texans, thousands more kept going with neither light nor water. For Angelina Diaz and her four children, Thursday was another day commuting between their cold West Dallas house and the cramped SUV in the driveway.

It was day 4 with no shower or bath. Day 4 without a toilet. Day 4 of warming up bottled water on a grill to create the formula for Ms. Diaz’s 6 month old daughter Jimena.

The family has spent almost a year washing their hands diligently to avoid contracting the coronavirus, and they feared that a week without water would ruin those efforts.

“How do we keep our hands clean?” Mrs. Diaz, 25, asked.

Most of her neighbors had electricity on Thursday afternoon, but as commercial vehicles drove through the mud, Ms. Diaz lost the patience to sleep in the car and shiver under blankets. She was drawn to hotels or urban heat centers but was too worried about exposing her family to the virus. So it went back to the SUV to wait.

At Family Place, a domestic violence shelter in Dallas, electricity was out for two days when the damp ceiling collapsed and triggered an ice-cold waterfall on the 120 women and children who sought refuge there.

The water soaked their clothes and the few possessions they had brought with them, and tainted hard-to-replace legal documents. The corridors became streams. Residents and staff attempted to clear out the water and stacked sheets to build dams, but soon gave up and hurriedly piled into five city buses for shelter at a church.

“You basically lost everything,” said Shelbi Driver, an attorney at the shelter.

Lawyers said at least three other domestic violence shelters in the Dallas area were also evacuated after pipes burst and their hallways flooded with cold water, displacing hundreds of vulnerable people who were unable to go home .

“You went through a terrible trauma, came to our organization to get to safety, and had another trauma,” said Paige Flink, executive director of Family Place. “It makes me cry just to say it,” she said. “It’s a total nightmare.”

Jack Healy reported from Dallas, Richard Fausset from Atlanta and James Dobbins from San Antonio. Maria Jimenez Moya reported from Houston and Lucy Tompkins from New York.

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