AUSTIN (Talk1370.com) -- As an unprecedented winter storm nears its end in the Austin area, the impacts left behind have rendered tens of thousands of Austin Water customers without water service Thursday and the entire city under a boil water notice.
City officials including Austin Water Director Greg Meszaros, Austin Energy General Manager Jackie Sargent, and Austin City Manager Spencer Cronk held a virtual press conference Thursday afternoon to provide an update on the city's response to the extreme winter weather.
"We don't know what we don't know," Meszaros said in regards to when water service might be restored to customers. "And we don't know where leaks are, we don't know how bad those leaks are going to be, we don't know how long some of them are going to take to fix."
Meszaros said the Austin Water system is split into three pressure zones, which are all "critical" right now. The utility is working to get all three zones back up and running as quickly as possible.
Power issues at the city's Ulrich Water Treatment Plant caused a drop in water pressure across the city's system Wednesday, prompting officials to issue a city-wide boil water notice. The drop in pressure impacted "tens of thousands" of customers across the city, including St. David's South Austin Medical Center.
All of the city's treatment plants are back online now. Meszaros said the next step is refilling the city's reservoirs, which store almost 100 million gallons of water a day - roughly the amount of water Austinites use in a single day.
"We never imagined a day where hospitals wouldn’t have water, large segments of our customer base wouldn’t have water, and we’re committed to restoring our system as safely and rapidly as we can," Meszaros said.
Once the water pressure is stable and some of the leaks are fixed, only then can officials sample the water and make sure there is no harmful bacteria present. That process alone could take days.