Austin City Council approves external audit for city’s water utility
AUSTIN, Texas - Austin Water is still in the middle of their own two-week investigation of what caused the Feb. 5 boil water notice.
Outgoing Austin Water Director Greg Meszaros said turbidity inside one of the water basins cascaded out of control, sending unfiltered water into the drinking water system.
"What we are hearing is that all the alarms and protocols were followed but yet the turbidity levels were not followed up on to take action to reduce them until many hours after they were started?" asked Mayor Pro Tem Alison Alter at Thursday’s council meeting. Meszaros responded with "essentially yes."
Austin Water said this was unrelated to the weather or infrastructure and attributed it to an operations failure.
"We are going through and reviewing with all employees involved," said Meszaros.
The director said they will then compare employee interviews with logs from the event. Thursday, the city council unanimously approved an external audit to be performed as soon as possible.
"This audit is one step we are taking to restore faith and trust in our ability to deliver safe and clean water," said Alter.
The Mayor Pro Tem called for the audit, citing the fact that the city has issued three boil water notices in four years, and there were two other questionable incidents.
"The scope of this is broader than this one incident because we are looking at what happened with five different incidents. These experts are going to be able to go in and look at different pieces of the system, not just what happened in those incidents but also our resilience," she said.
The audit passed with all on the dais in agreement.
"Are we operating at best practices and what improvements do we need in order to do that?" asked Ann Kitchen, District 5.
Ultimately, Alter is hoping her audit can restore the public's trust in their city leaders and services.
"We need to have a fuller picture. We need to have information coming from experts that is not frankly filtered through Austin Water," said Alter.
Austin Water customers in the South Congress area have been reporting foul smelling water. The utility sent an update to FOX 7 Austin:
"We received a few calls yesterday from customers concerned about smelly water. We are looking into the cause of yesterday’s localized taste and odor issue which was reported by customers close to the South Congress/Stassney intersection. We want to reassure our customers that water has been tested throughout our system, and it is safe to drink. We increased levels of activated carbon at our treatment plants to mitigate the issue. Additionally, our teams flushed fire hydrants in the reported area to circulate water throughout our system. Our teams will continue targeted flushing of fire hydrants in the area today. Flushing fire hydrants is part of our year round maintenance which helps to circulate water throughout our system and ensures our water is fresh tasting and high quality. We encourage customers to contact us at 512-972-1000, Option 1, to report any taste/odor issues or water or wastewater concerns."
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