Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Storm-hit cities facing water crisis
Southern U.S. dealing with ruptured pipes, building damage and expensive repairs after deadly weather.
AUSTIN, Texas — Southern cities slammed by winter storms that left millions without power for days have traded one crisis for another: Busted water pipes ruptured by record-low temperatures created shortages of clean drinking water, shut down the Memphis airport on Friday and left hospitals struggling to maintain sanitary conditions.
Texas authorities ordered 7 million people to boil tap water before drinking it because low water pressure could have allowed bacteria to seep into the system. A man died at an Abilene health care facility when a lack of water pressure made medical treatment impossible.
About 260,000 homes and businesses in Tennessee’s largest county, which includes Memphis, were told to boil water because of water main ruptures and problems at pumping stations. Restaurants that can’t do so or don’t have bottled water were ordered to close. And water pressure problems prompted Memphis International Airport to cancel all incoming and outgoing flights Friday.
In Jackson, Mississippi, most of the city of about 161,000 had no running water. Crews pumped water to refill city tanks but faced a shortage of chemicals for treatment because icy roads made it difficult for distributors to deliver them, Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba said.
She laid blame on city water pipes that are more than 100 years old, saying they were not built to handle the freezing weather that the city was hit with as multiple storms dumped record amounts of snow across the South.
“We are dealing with an extreme challenge with getting more water through our distribution system,” said Lumumba.
The city was providing water for flushing toilets and drinking, but residents had to pick it up, leaving the elderly and those living on icy roads vulnerable.
Lisa Thomas said her driveway on a hill in Jackson was a sheet of ice. Her husband, who is on a defibrillator and heart monitor, has only enough heart medication to get him through Sunday because she hasn’t been able to go to the pharmacy.
“People are in dire need here,” Thomas said.
Water woes were the latest misery for residents left without heat or electricity for days after the ice and snow storms earlier in the week, forcing rolling blackouts from Minnesota to Texas.
Texas electrical grid operators said Friday that transmission had returned to normal for the first time since a storm knocked out power to more than 4 million customers. Smaller outages remained, but Bill Magness, president of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, said the grid can now provide power throughout the entire system.
Gov. Greg Abbott ordered an investigation into the failure for state known as the U.S. energy capital. ERCOT officials have defended their preparations and the decision to begin forced outages Monday as the grid reached a breaking point.
The storms also left more than 330,000 from Virginia to Louisiana without power. About 70,000 in Oregon on Friday were still enduring a weeklong outage following a massive ice and snow storm.
The extreme weather was blamed for the deaths of at least 60 people.
As of Thursday afternoon, more than 1,000 Texas public water systems and 177 of the state’s 254 counties had reported weather-related operational disruptions, affecting more than 14 million people, according to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.
More than 1 million gallons of water was being trucked Friday to the Texas capital. But Austin’s water director, Greg Maszaros, implored residents to minimize the use of home faucets because “there’s still a lot of unknowns as we pressurize the system.”
In Dallas, David Lopez said the plumbing company he works for received more than 600 calls for service over the last week.
“It’s pretty much first come, first served,” Lopez said.
Houston residents probably will have to boil tap water in the fourth-largest U.S. city until Sunday or Monday, said Mayor Sylvester Turner.
Water service was restored Friday to two Houston Methodist community hospitals, but officials were still bringing in drinking water and some elective surgeries were canceled, spokeswoman Gale Smith said.
St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis said it was forced to switch to bottled water and bagged ice for all consumption and that staff and patients were washing with hand sanitizer and no-rinse bathing wipes. All non-urgent surgeries were postponed.
Central Arkansas Water, which services the Little Rock area, asked customers to conserve water to help protect its system as the ground began to warm and pipes thawed.
In Little Rock, the Museum of Discovery reported that a broken pipe flooded its building — causing extensive damage to theaters, galleries and offices and killing one display animal, a bluetongued skink lizard.
Over 192,000 Louisiana residents — some still struggling to recover from last August’s Hurricane Laura — had no water service Friday, according to the state health department. Tens of thousands more remained under boil-water advisories, according to the health department.