Woodcreek water outage hits 850 homes
Water went down to an estimated 850 homes covering the entirety of the city of Woodcreek last week after a 30-year-old pump failed.
Aqua Texas water services went down about 2 p.m. on Monday, July 23 and was down until noon on Tuesday. Water pressure was returned and a boil water notice was put in place for the next two days.
“Anytime a complete loss of pressure occurs, Texas Commission of Environmental Quality requires a boil water notice until we confirm through bacteriological tests that the water is free of contamination,” Matt Welch, Aqua Texas Spokesperson said. “We received the test results at 5 pm (on Thursday) that confirm the water is free of contamination, and we immediately notified customers that they no longer must boil their water.”
The outage was caused by a combination of issues.
“The Woodcreek water system has two wells and treatment plants, and the failure of one well ordinarily would not have caused the loss of service to customers because we normally have a backup,” Welch said. “Unfortunately, this week’s well failure happened at the same time that the other well was offline for a complete rehabilitation of the water tower.”
When the water went out, Aqua Texas reached out to other community partners to try and help provide water to residents. H-E-B helped provide drinking water and Welch said the company “jumped in with both feet” by bringing the water over to city hall and helping pass it out to residents.
Woodcreek Mayor Bill Scheel commended the efforts of Aqua Texas employees to provide water and fix the problem, but he was also critical of the company’s practices within the city historically.
“I think it was due to bad planning on the part of Aqua Texas or bad maintenance over the years but you can’t predict when a 30-year-old pump is going to go out,” Scheel said. “I thought (Aqua Texas staff) did a good job of trying to meet the public need and get water… I give (them) high marks, but I don’t give any good marks for Aqua Texas. We have experienced in Woodcreek any number of failures in sewer line maintenance and repair and failure to complete water line refurbishment. They divided the town into multiple phases six years ago and did phase 1 of water line replacement, and then disappeared. Phases 2 and 3 haven’t been talked about again as far as I know. That kind lack of attention to aging infrastructure is what we have come to expect from Aqua Texas.“
Aqua Texas said they have “completed all repairs” that caused the outage, which “included a full replacement of all the well components.” Maintenance continues on the water tower.