Boil Water Notice Caused by Human Error, Ongoing Problems

Austin Water Director Greg Meszaros speaks during a Feb. 5 press conferences on Austin's most recent boil water notice (Image via ATXN.TV)

On Tuesday, Feb. 15, after City Council recognized February as a month of remembrance for the victims and survivors of Winter Storm Uri a year ago, it aimed to figure out why Austin Water had to issue its third citywide boil water notice in four years on Feb. 5, in the wake of a less severe freeze earlier this month. "Many people were caught off guard because we figured we made it through the freeze, only to be surprised by a boil water notice," began Council Member Paige Ellis, who pushed for the special called meeting and called the events "triggering" in light of the Uri catastrophe. "Austinites deserve a safe, reliable, and resilient water system they can have confidence in, and I'm hopeful this process will achieve that."

Opening statements from Austin Water Director Greg Meszaros, who announced his resignation last week, and City Manager Spencer Cronk confirmed that while the prior boil water notices were necessitated by extreme weather impacts on the city's treatment plants, this one was due to human error and "ultimately preventable," in Meszaros' words. As CMs ran through questions prompted by the memo AW sent last Friday detailing the timeline of events, most honed in on AW's internal communication breakdown, the city's emergency alert systems, and ongoing issues with the Ullrich Water Treatment Plant in West Lake Hills.

Meszaros explains that the root cause was the startup of Basin 6, one of the settling basins where raw water from Lake Austin is detained before being treated, filtered, and distributed to AW's 1 million users. Turbidity levels – a measure of the amount of silt and sediment in the water that needs to be removed – both in Basin 6 and in the public water supply were stable and normal as of 10pm on Friday, Feb. 4.

But by 2am Saturday, Basin 6 turbidity had increased nearly threefold, and by 6am was nearly 17 times higher than the day before, although the levels at the tap were still normal, and customers' drinking water was never actually contaminated. The plant was shut down by midmorning Saturday, and after consulting with the Texas Commis­sion on Environmental Quality throughout the day, Meszaros opted to issue the citywide boil water notice in the early evening. It remained in effect until Tuesday.

Meszaros and Cronk did not learn about the turbidity spike until about 8am on Saturday, and nobody is sure why; Meszaros said that "Basin 6 could have been isolated" and disconnected from the system: "You just press a button." There is no evidence of gross negligence – sleeping on duty, leaving the plant, or fabricating data – but shifts are 7am-7pm and vice versa, and Meszaros suggested that information may not have been passed along at shift change.

He pointed to a larger issue that's impacting all city departments, AW included: staffing shortages and extremely high turnover. Noting that in January alone, AW lost 20 employees, he told Council, "We used to have a lot of operators with 15-20 years of experience. Those days are gone." In response, CMs discussed increasing AW wages and reassessing training, oversight, and the utility's internal alert system.

As for alerting the public, the boil notice was transmitted both through Austin Water's customer database (there are about 250,000 customer accounts) and the Warn Central Texas "reverse 911" system; but neither is comprehensive. Residents without AW accounts – including most of Austin's apartment dwellers – were alerted through a "special mailer." Though the notice was lifted at 10:20pm Tuesday, Warn Central Texas didn't send an alert until 8am Wednesday, "to avoid waking people," according to the Friday memo.

Even though Ullrich primarily supplies water to customers south of the river, Meszaros opted to issue a citywide boil notice as the system is interconnected, which is usually a good thing that makes AW more resilient. Because the Davis and Handcox Water Treatment Plants picked up the slack, water continued flowing to all users, but CM Alison Alter pointed out that all boil notices in the past four years have originated from Ullrich, the largest of the three (Handcox, on Lake Travis, has future capacity) but also 53 years old. "We have to be asking if there are things going on in Ullrich," said Alter, and Meszaros acknowledged, "When Ullrich is wobbly, the system is wobbly. And Ullrich has been struggling the most." He stressed that the issue is "not just infrastructure ... [but also] the culture, the training, and the workforce."

Both Ellis and Meszaros pushed back hard on claims made by a KLBJ-AM talk-radio caller claiming to be one of the AW employees suspended in the wake of the snafu, which suggested that underfunding of the utility, along with the freeze and the "crumbling" water infrastructure, prompted the boil water notice. Meszaros said the caller's claims don't appear to line up with the facts as known, and he said he's never been dissatisfied with the amount of funding Coun­cil has allocated to the utility (which basically pays for itself via rates and subsidizes Austin's General Fund with the excess).

"Today is the beginning of many steps the city must take to rebuild public trust," concluded Ellis. AW is looking into offering a 2,000-gallon credit to customers as compensation for extra water used to flush pipes, and Meszaros acknowledged that "this was really about our operations of the plants, how we communicate, [how] we make decisions, how we respond to alarms, how we escalate – and all of those are all within our control." Further questions from CMs on data sharing, working conditions, and staffing will be answered at this Thursday's Council meeting when Alter's call for an external audit will be voted on, and at next Wednesday's meeting of the Council AW Oversight Committee, chaired by CM Vanessa Fuentes.