Fire officials discuss foam entering water supply following church fire in January
AUSTIN, Texas - On January 22 there was a substantial fire at WestOak Woods Baptist Church. Dozens of firefighters were called to contain it, then soon after residents living nearby reported their water was foamy and smelled like chemicals.
Austin Water says for two days, at least 300 people were impacted.
Monday afternoon the Austin Fire Department held a press conference where they apologized multiple times to the people who live in the Tanglewood community in South Austin about what happened afterwards.
The assistant fire chief says he’s been with the department for 28 years and this has never happened. January 22nd nearly 75 firefighters responded to a church fire off West Slaughter Lane.
RELATED: AFD: Fire at South Austin church building was accidental
Jacob Surles has been living at Landmark at Prescott Woods Apartments for about two years.
On January 22nd he returned home from the gym to shower but had quite the surprise when he turned on his water.
"But it didn't smell like soap it smelled like detergent and it didn't have a texture it didn't leave a film."
Hours before AFD was fighting this fire at WestOak Woods Baptist Church.
“During that fire we had some trouble making a good entry and extinguishing the property so at one point during the fire the decision was made to actually use class-A foam,” Aaron Woolverton Assistant Chief of Operations at AFD says.
AFD says this normally wouldn't have been an issue. But the engine closest to the fire had a broken foam system. Firefighters used a second engine to pump foam into it while both were still connected to fire hydrants. The second engine pumped at a slightly greater pressure than the fire hydrant, which allowed backflow into the hydrant. This caused water to be contaminated with the foam,
“After letting the water run for a while you'd think something like that would flush out and after it kept running it was clear it wasn't going to flush out,” Surles says.
It didn't only impact Surles, Austin Water says hundreds of people were affected. The city delivered bottled water to residents for two days while testing was done to confirm why the water was soapy, smelly and foamy, since it wasn't safe to drink or ingest at the time.
“So even after it cleared out after the few days I still had soapy water so about 4 days ongoing. It actually overflowed my toilet and the soap is about this high. I kept my kids out of it we didn't do baths,” Surles adds.
Monday afternoon AFD told the media they've never seen this happen before.
Woolverton adds, “the lesson learned from this is if we're going to pump to a second unit that unit can't be connected to the water supply. You have the shut the hydrant or you have to shut the intake to the engine but you can't take water from two water supplies."
Surles says he hopes other residents are understanding that this wasn't intentional.
He adds, “the fire department does to hurt the populous is slim to none right? When it comes down to it you have to weigh out your options do you want to have a quickly responding fire department and risk certain things being inconvenient or do you want to not have a fire department. For me I'll always support the fire department."
Both AFD and Austin Water say they haven't received reports of anyone getting sick from ingesting the water.