‘Errors’ at treatment plant force 1 million to boil their water

Roughly 1 million people in Austin have had to boil their water since Saturday after officials said “errors” at a treatment plant resulted in potentially unsafe water flowing into homes and businesses in one of the largest and fastest-growing U.S. cities.

It was the second time in a year that residents of the Texas capital have been told to boil water before drinking. Last February, the problems were caused by the collapse of the state’s electricity grid, which resulted in power failures at Austin’s largest water treatment plant.

But city officials said the issues at the Ullrich Water Treatment Plant over the weekend were unrelated to a winter storm that caused temperatures to plunge across the state late last week.

“This is a very different event than what happened last year,” City Manager Spencer Cronk said during a news conference Sunday.

In a state still traumatized by the failure of its electrical systems during a bitter cold last year, the directive over the weekend to boil water caused frustration and anger across Austin. The notice is likely to remain in effect for the entire city until at least Tuesday afternoon.

“We have to do a better job,” said Mayor Steve Adler during a television interview Monday. “In our city, we can’t have our water system going down like this.”

Adler said 7,000 cases of bottled water had been distributed by the city, along with 6,000 gallons of water from delivery tankers. Still, he said, the situation was “incredibly frustrating for everybody in this city.”

About 8 a.m. Saturday, the head of Austin Water, Greg Meszaros, was alerted to a spike in “turbidity” — the cloudiness of the water going to consumers — at the Ullrich plant. The plant was immediately shut down.

“They’re essentially water factories,” Meszaros said at the Sunday news conference. “And sometimes in factories, you’ve got to stop the assembly line. And that’s where it was not properly stopped and corrected, and it was allowed to carry through to the finished water, and that’s just not appropriate.”

Meszaros said the failure had been caused by “errors from our operating staff at our Ullrich plant” and said an investigation was continuing. It was not immediately clear at what point the errors occurred or how many people were responsible.