No Clear Timeline Set For Lifting Austin Boil-Water Mandate

AUSTIN, TEXAS — Austin officials staged a press conference Tuesday afternoon to apprise the public on efforts to stabilize the city's water treatment plants to improve the quality of water compromised by flood-induced debris after recent heavy rains.

But it's still unclear how long Austin residents will have to adhere to a citywide "boil-water" notice to stave off potential bacteria after debris, mud and silt sullied the local water supply. On Monday, water utility officials issued a plea to the public to curb water use to lessen the amount of water flowing into their treatment plants. At the press conference, officials praised the public for having heeded the request.

“The more people conserve, the sooner we are going to get out of this situation that we are in,” Mayor Steve Adler said. He was joined by Austin City Manager Spencer Cronk; Austin Water Director Greg Meszaros; Eric Carter, the chief emergency management coordinator at the Office of Emergency Management; Juan Ortiz, director for Home Security and Emergency Management for the City of Austin; and others at a 3:45 p.m. press conference to update the public on cleanup efforts at city's three water treatment plants.

Those three treatment facilities were overburdened with a high volume of flood-induced detritus that compromised the quality of the drinking supply after historic flooding in Travis County and surrounding areas. The tap water's resulting cloudy appearance prompted officials to implement a boil-water notice to the entire city in an unprecedented step. Residents are urged to boil their water before drinking it or using it in food preparation given the potential for debris-caused bacteria.

View of the muddied, rain-swollen Colorado River from the MoPac Expressway (Loop 1), just west of Zilker Park, early afternoon on Friday, Oct. 19, 2018. Photo by Tony Cantú/Patch staff

The press conference also ostensibly served to clarify a stream of misinformation among city and county officials as to how long residents will have to comply with the boil-water mandate. Officials earlier on Tuesday said it might be up to two weeks before the water clears up, a projection disputed by Meszaros, who put the chronology more along the lines of a "handful of days."

Previous story: Austin Boil-Water Mandate Could Last 'Handful Of Days' To 2 Weeks

Cronk echoed the sentiment: "While we're planning for and prepared for whatever mother nature might throw at us, we have no indication at this point that this will be a long-term issue. We are talking days, and not weeks."

Adler painted earlier conflicting timelines as merely a miscommunication among officials, saying the earlier two-week time frame given related to the length of time for the planning process at stabilizing water treatment plants, and not necessarily the boil-water notice duration.

But when pressed for details specific to a possible date to have the boil-water notice lifted, Meszaros was more nuanced — one might say vague — given the machinations of water treatment and mercurial nature of weather. "I think there's a few parameters to that," the water director said. "One, we need to recharge our system and fill our reservoirs. That's our protective buffer for fire protection, for maintaining minimum system pressures. For the last several days, we have been draining down our reservoirs, and today we reversed that and are starting to fill them up. That will take at least a couple ov days to go through."

But that's hardly the end of the process, let alone the imminent end of the boil-water notice.

"I think a secondary parameter is that our plants are reliably treating enough water to continue to meet the demands and make sure our reservoirs are filling up and that the water is of high quality and meets all the regulatory standards," Meszaros said. "We're getting there are our plants are improving here, and so we think in a very short time we'll be there."

But while an optimistic timeline, it's still an unknown. Forecasters are predicting a chance of more substantial rains on Wednesday, which would throw a wrench in the water works.

"The one variable that we can't control is the weather," Meszaros said. "If we get a washout event again in the Llano Basin or the Padernales basin or some part of the reservoir system above us and turbidities soar again, that could be a setback. And so I think we'll have a better sense of that after Wednesday through Thursday morning. And as all that starts to come together, we'll be able to begin to pull out of the boil-water notice."

Turbidity is a term referring to the cloudiness or haziness of a fluid caused by a large number of particles generally invisible to the naked eye.

Another confusing bit of messaging at the press conference related to fears the city might run out of water given the ongoing emergency treatment process rendering potable water unusable. Adler disputed the claim, saying stores that have been running out of bottled water are merely running out of space to store it on shelves and not running out of the liquid commodity. Those unable to find water on Tuesday likely will score some H2O the following day once shelves are restocked, Adler assured.

Once re-stocked on bottled water, one convenience store near UT-Austin priced 24-count cases at $8.99 in light of demand amid citywide shortages. Photo by Tony Cantú/Patch staff.

But if those water-less scenarios are untrue, how does that explain the need for Austin-requested large amounts of donated water from the San Antonio Water System (SAWS) in the neighboring city? The question was neither posed nor answered at the press conference.

SAWS officials told media outlets a tanker holding more than 5,000 gallons of water from their Edwards Aquifer source were en route to Austin, along with a smaller tank dubbed the "water monster" holding 125 gallons. The neighboring city has been asked to remain available to help out with water for at least three days, a SAWS spokeswoman told media outlets.

Still, officials put the best possible spin on the unprecedented state of local affairs, with Meszaros joining in while invoking rosy projections as to the lifting of the boil-water notice: "Hopefully, as the mayor suggests, by this weekend. But again, there are certain variable that we can't predict or control, and we'll have to evaluate those over the next few days."

In the end, the messaging proved as murky as the appearance of flood-compromised tap water flowing from faucets across the city. National Weather Service forecasters are less fuzzy in their own predictions: Showers are likely on Wednesday night, likely before 1 a.m., with thunderstorms also possible after 1 p.m. New rainfall amounts of up to two inches are possible, NWS forecasters predict, with the chance of precipitation at solid 100 percent.By Wednesday night, the chance of precipitation is expected to drop to 60 percent, with additional rain amounts between a quarter and a half of an inch possible.

"An upper-level trough over the Four Corners region plus sufficient moisture will lead to rain showers and scattered thunderstorms in the Southwest, Southern Rockies, and into Texas through Tuesday," forecasters wrote. "The trough moving eastward will bring rain to much of Texas on Tuesday night and Wednesday."

While the storm formations yield marginal risks of flash flooding, temperatures "much below normal" will persist throughout the areas of Texas experiencing the forecast active weather, meteorologists added.

Thus, despite the rosiest projections city officials were able to muster, Mother Nature may be the ultimate arbiter as to when the boil-water notice might expire, rendering that time frame an unknown. So keep your eyes on the skies, and — unless you're among the lucky ones who secured cases of bottled water before local stores ran out —keep boiling that H20.

Related stories:

Austin: 5 Things To Know About Filters, Boil-Water Alerts

Lake Austin Residents Brace For Man-Made Deluge As Dams Open

Travis, Williamson Counties Flash Flood Watch Extended

Travis County Judge Declares Region Disaster Area

Maps Show Destruction Should Travis County Dams Break

Texas Transportation Officials To Assess Storm Damage

Nature's Fury: Central Texas Rain Leaves Destruction In Its Wake

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