In addition to ordering more than 200,000 Fort Worth residents to boil water due to a power outage at a treatment plant, the Fort Worth water department also wants to quell rumors that it will soon cut off water. in the city because “the pipes explode,” a viewer told NBC 5.
“We will not turn off the water to prevent major breakages, but we will turn off the water to repair major breakages,” spokeswoman Mary Gugliuzza said. “We’re seeing more breaks, so people will experience temporary outages” in problem areas.
Gugliuzza says there are about two dozen active breaks mostly inside loop 820, where there are older cast iron pipes. Repairs are being made, but they may be slower than normal to protect equipment working in cold temperatures.
“We encourage people to keep water available in the event of a major breakdown,” he said. Water embedding is only turned off to fix a major break.
As the water department responds to the current outages, it is also trying to defrost the equipment to get the Eagle Mountain aquatic plant back into service as soon as possible.
A power outage at the plant forced the city to extend a boiling water warning to include a total of 212,000 residents in Fort Worth. Nine appointments that purchase drinking water from Fort Worth (Haslet, Keller, Lake Worth, Northlake, Roanoke, Saginaw, Southlake, Trophy Club and Westlake) have been reported.
“The good news is that we now have energy at all of our treatment facilities, but the challenge is that everything has been frozen,” Gugliuzza said, explaining that several plants were affected by power outages that began Monday at morning. “We tried to keep different parts of the system running, but unfortunately we couldn’t do that with most of the northern part of the system.”
Gugliuzza said without power and heat, the valves and on-site control mechanisms at some of the pumping stations simply froze as temperatures dropped. The issue was not the pipes, she said.
In a post on social media, the water department acknowledged that power outages make some residents unable to boil water.
“We know that the boiling water notice doesn’t make sense if customers don’t have it. The Texas Environmental Quality Commission has specific language for these warnings that we should use and that’s the reason for the notice.” , said the message.
The plan to establish places to distribute bottled water to residents also had problems, the water department also explained in the post.
“We were anticipating that they would be operational today, but this morning we learned that our emergency bottled water supplier cannot open its plant. The water company is looking for alternative sources of supply. We will advertise the locations and times once we have secured supply. “
In a notice to residents, the city said: “When the water pressure is restored, affected customers should expect to be in a boiling water boiling at least until late Wednesday. The company will issue another notice. when you check that the water is safe “.
In the meantime, customers with questions can call water customer service at 817-392-4477 or email [email protected].