El Paso Water Utilities Looking At What Went Wrong, How To Prevent It From Repeating

Water officials estimate there are between 15,000 and 20,000 residents dealing with broken pipes throughout the city.

If you’re worried your bill may be too high because of leaking water, El Paso Water Utilities officials say they’ll work with you to adjust the bill.

Nick Costanzo, EPWU’s vice president of business operations and finance, said the utility is looking at ways to prevent this, even if this kind of freeze only happens about every 30 years in the city.

“We will harden our systems, spend a lot more money on backup generation, make sure our telecommunications don’t freeze at extremely low levels, in wind chills 7 below (zero),” Costanzo said.

The utility officials also said they were unable to determine the reservoirs were getting dangerously low until Saturday, because the electrical outages affected the equipment that alerts them of low levels.

“We were blind,” said Billiew. Utility leaders sent employees to look at the reservoirs, but with many in high mountain areas, and frozen conditions, the low levels were hard to gauge.

The water company uses December, January and February as a benchmark to average winter usage. But Costanzo said they’d make sure the extraordinary weather wouldn’t affect rates. “Because of the situation that happened in February, we will make sure (to use) historical averages on our average winter consumptions so it doesn’t impact their sewer or water bills going forward.”

Costanzo added the outages compounded the problem. “With 20,000 people, there was no preparedness because historically we had not seen outages like this. Nobody planned or expected for 50% of the electric company’s power to be lost, that had never happened in the history of El Paso”

Utility officials say their response was adequate under the circumstances. “We recovered quickly. Some people don’t think we recovered quickly enough because they went through 3 days of freezing water. But our situation started Saturday, and we had it resolved Monday morning, and now we’re going to reduce the restrictions by tonight (Monday)”, said Costanzo.

“We have employees who haven’t seen their families in four or five days because they’ve been out fixing stuff and keeping things running and we’re very happy with that” said Billiew.

El Paso’s mandatory water restrictions that started Saturday, Feb. 5 afternoon were lifted at 10 p.m. Monday, Feb. 7 after El Paso Water Utilities’ (EPWU) depleted reservoirs were filled up to adequate levels. EPWU was still asking the community to refrain from outdoor irrigation through Saturday to help ensure that reservoirs remain at adequate levels.

The restrictions were originally set to last 24 hours but were extended indefinitely.

Under the water restrictions, the public was asked to refrain from washing cars, showering, using dishwasher or clothes washing machines, or anything else that uses a large amount of water. The only exceptions are for water used for public safety purposes like hospitals and other emergency medical facilities.

On Sunday, Mayor John Cook declared a water emergency in the city of El Paso pursuant to the city’s drought and water emergency code, title 15.13.120 which allows EPWU to enforce mandatory water restrictions currently in effect. EPWU officials said all businesses asked to comply with the restrictions did so.

Area schools and universities, which were closed Wednesday through Friday last week because of rolling blackouts and bad road conditions due to weather, were closed Monday because of the water situation. Schools, universities and government institutions were set to reopen Tuesday.

EPWU officials said on ABC-7 Xtra Sunday night that 15 reservoirs had five feet or less of water Saturday, which led to the restrictions. According to EPWU’s, the utility has 55 reservoirs.