Horizon loses water after power outage
Horizon residents were left without water this morning, and the city is under a boil order. The Horizon Water Utility is telling all its customers to boil water before drinking it to make it safe after the water outage.
Residents we spoke with say they woke up and weren’t able to turn on their faucets to brew their coffee and tea, and couldn’t shower. For some, water would be shut off for more than four hours.
“This morning, roughly around 6 in the morning I woke up and there was no water, there was no water,” said Andres Romo, a Horizon City resident.
Some restaurants even had to shut down for hours, workers telling ABC-7 the water went out around 6:30 am. While some residents feared it would take a while to get service back up, most people started getting their water back between 10:30 and 11 a.m.
“I was even telling my wife that I was fearful it would last all weekend, I was like ‘this is not good at all,'” said Ramon Hernandez, another resident.
“It came back all at once, all at once. We had the kitchen sink open just to go ahead and once it came back we would know about it,” Hernandez said.
We reached out to the Horizon Water Utilities and they said a microburst storm knocked out the power in the area, and the water pumps didn’t have electricity to function
“Last night around 9 pm we had a blackout, not just this home but the whole area was pitch dark,” Romo said.
It would be several hours after electricity was restored for the pumps to get back up to speed. Just in time, as temperatures started rising in a neighborhood where water keeps people cool.
“With the heat and everything it can be a danger to the kids and the elderly…a lot of people in this area have evaporative cooling, and without water they can’t function with their ACs as well”
We also reached out to EL Paso Water to see if they had any plans in case something like this happened in El Paso, they say they’re working closely with El Paso electric to minimize the harm to the public in case there was a shortage.
