Houston Mayor Defends Issuing ‘Boil Water’ Notice to Millions of Residents

Mayor of Houston, Texas, Sylvester Turner speaks during a news conference at the 90th Winter Meeting of United States Conference of Mayors in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 19, 2022. Alex Wong/Getty Images

Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner on Monday defended issuing a notice urging over 2 million people in the area to boil their tap water for drinking, cooking, and bathing.

The notice was issued after a power outage at the East Water Purification Plant at 10:30 a.m. on Sunday prompted the city’s water pressure to fall below 20 pounds per square inch (psi), the minimum required by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ).

As a result, multiple schools in the Houston area were shut down on Monday.

At a press conference, Turner said the city issued the notice out of an “abundance of caution” after two transformers at the plant —a main one and its backup—“uniquely and coincidentally” failed, impacting the plant’s ability to treat water and pump water into the transmission system.

This in turn created low water pressure, he said, noting that backup power generators would not have made a difference because the transformers were down, meaning that no power could be transmitted to the plant.

He added that the power system at the water plant is subject to regular maintenance, although he did not provide exact details as to how often the maintenance occurs.

‘We Believe the Water Is Safe’

Turner also asked residents not to compare the boil water notice to the “February freeze“ in 2021 that left millions without power in Texas and led to the deaths of 246 people. That was prompted after a snowstorm prompted the state’s electric power grid to collapse.

“The February freeze is a totally sort of different matter,” Turner said. “You lost power and water and things remained down for several days, OK? For several days.”

Turner said his office believes the water is safe as there has been was no indication that the water system was contaminated. The mayor has launched a review into the matter and water sampling began Monday morning.

“We believe the water is safe but based on regulatory requirements when the pressure drops below 20 psi, we are obligated to issue a boil water notice,” the mayor’s office said on Twitter on Monday. “The City is submitting its plan to TCEQ for approval tonight.”

Turner added that the boil order would be lifted 24 hours after the city is notified that the water is safe. He said he is “optimistic the results will come back clean.”

“Water samples will subsequently follow and hopefully we will get the all-clear from TCEQ. The city has to wait 24 hours from that point before the boil water notice is suspended. The earliest would be tomorrow night or very early Tuesday morning,” he said in a follow-up post.

The boil notice advises residents not to drink water without boiling it first for at least two minutes to “ensure destruction of all harmful bacteria and other microbes.” Individuals without power are asked to boil water and are advised to use bottled water for consumption.

“When it is no longer necessary to boil the water, the public water system officials will notify customers that the water is safe for drinking water or human consumption purposes,” it adds.

Houston Schools Close

Houstons’ largest public school system Houston ISD, which serves more than 194,000 students, closed its schools for the day on Monday following the notice.

“Due to the Boil Water Notice issued by the City of Houston late this evening, all Houston ISD schools, offices, and facilities will be closed Monday, Nov. 28. #HISD will closely monitor the situation and provide additional updates regarding operations tomorrow,” Houston ISD wrote in a statement Sunday night.

Elsewhere on Monday, Yvonne Williams Forest, director of Houston Water, told KHOU 11 News that the system had experienced a “low-pressure event” but that it “never lost pressure fully,” meaning that there was “never an opportunity for anything to enter our system” and that “they just fell below the regulatory requirements.”

Forest reiterated Mayor Turner’s comments that the boil water notice was issued “out of an abundance of caution.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.