City’s boil water notice was too little, too late
All it took was a few minutes of low water pressure at a water treatment facility to derail the fourthlargest city in the country. It took an additional eight hours before residents found out anything had happened.
And apparently, it’s going to take another day of Houston public school closures for us to resume life as usual. The Houston Independent School District announced late Monday via robocall to parents that it would be closed Tuesday, too.
More than 2.2 million customers across Houston were subject to a boil water notice. At least four area school districts, several community college campuses and a number of other schools canceled classes Monday, and countless Houston residents and parents were left scrambling when the late-night text came in letting everyone know that the bedtime bath they’d just completed should’ve been done with boiled water.
What took so long between the power outage at 10:30 a.m. Sunday that triggered the drop in water pressure and the notice that went out around 7 that night?
For hours Sunday, officials reviewed data, debating whether an emergency notice was even required. At a news conference Monday morning, Mayor Sylvester Turner attempted to calm concerns, but the explanation only underscored the frustration many Houstonians felt Sunday night at the disjointed nature of the ordeal made more chaotic by the city’s communication, or lack thereof.
Completely unbeknownst to most of us enjoying a sunny end to a holiday weekend, the city was busy Sunday responding to a potential disaster at the Galena Park facility, where power failures from two transformers — both inside the facility — caused water pressure to drop to dangerous levels. What about a generator, many asked when news of the outage circulated much later? It wouldn’t have helped in this situation because the problem was inside the plant and not with a lack of electricity from CenterPoint, officials confirmed Monday. In total, 21 water pressure monitoring sites at various locations recorded lowered levels shortly before 11 a.m.
By that time, the levels at 16 of the 21 sites dropped below the emergency regulatory level. Pressure rebounded in just two minutes at most of those, but two remained at dangerous levels for a half-hour. By 12:30, the power was restored — still hours before Houstonians would know about any of this.
It wasn’t until after 2:30 p.m. that the city began talking with the state’s environmental regulator to determine whether a boil water notice would be necessary. By 6:30 p.m., they’d decided to go ahead with the notice “out of an abundance of caution,” according to the mayor.
The balance between caution and urgency is a tough and familiar one for a city that regularly watches approaching tropical storms and weighs whether to send the whole population packing.
In the end, it was less than two minutes below emergency levels for 14 monitoring sites and 30 minutes for two of them. “The thinking was, it was not going to trigger a need for a boil water notice and there was no alarm,” Turner explained Monday. As delayed as the notice was, it was still well within state regulations. “You have 24 hours,” Turner added. Certainly, it’s a consequential decision. “Do you want to issue a boil water notice to a city of 2 millionplus people? No,” Turner said. It shut down schools, disrupted businesses and forced hospitals to postpone surgeries.
But the long deliberation, coupled with the belated notice and confusion about whether the water really was mostly safe but also not usable, didn’t exactly bolster our trust in the city’s ability to handle a bigger emergency — and to tell us about it in a timely manner.
While Turner emphasized Monday that it was just a couple minutes of emergency-level pressure at most of the monitoring sites and that there were no worrying signs of contamination Sunday, we’re reminded of the saying about how much, let’s say, fecal matter it takes to ruin a glass of clean water. A drop. Not a reassuring thought when you’re awoken in bed by a late-night text from the city instructing you to boil your water due to a notice that was, in fact, issued hours earlier. For an emergency alert system, again, the sense of urgency was lacking.
Clean water is an essential public good we all pay for. And when systems fail, it’s individuals who pay the price.
And help, by and large, was not on the way Monday. “If there are certain areas for example or facilities that need water, we will certainly do our best,” Turner said. But this is not like Winter Storm Uri, he said, so get boiling.
Back in September, when Jackson, Miss., had been without clean drinking water for a month, Turner admirably organized a bottled water donation drive outside City Hall.
“They are not alone,” the mayor said then.
Far too many Houstonians felt that way Monday.
Decision took hours; more time passed before many learned of it.