Texas’ water infrastructure is broken, jeopardizing quality and supply for a growing state
Tom Bailey had just finished his morning routine of checking the town’s three water well sites when he got a call from a resident: Water was coming out of the road.
Bailey, public works director for this small, East Texas town, hopped in his pickup truck and drove to the scene on a bumpy road that sits behind the high school.
The entire road was wet.
“Water was just boiling up in the middle of the road,” Bailey said. “Not normal. Not normal at all.”
As water continued to flow down the street, Bailey and Cody Day, a water operator who works under Bailey, jumped back in the truck and drove into town to pick up a mini excavator from storage. They returned and dug into the ground to find the water source: a leaking pipe.
That one leak turned into a saga. Every time Bailey and Day would make a repair, the line would break somewhere else. Customers in the area lost water intermittently for three days.
“I felt disappointed in myself,” Bailey said. “If it’s my repair and my repair failed, then I did something wrong.”
The repeated line breaks were not under Bailey’s control. Installed in the 1960s, the pipes are part of a larger, deteriorating underground infrastructure that Bailey was handed when he took over as the town’s public works director in January. His start date followed a disastrous water crisis that left Zavalla’s roughly 700 residents without drinking water for 10 days and forced the town’s water department to work on Christmas Eve.
“There’s so much in disrepair,” Bailey said. “It’s a daily balance.”
Zavalla’s struggles are not unique. Across the state, from the arid plains of West Texas to the Piney Woods along the Louisiana border, water and wastewater infrastructure is failing — if it exists at all.
The Lone Star State’s drinking water infrastructure barely received a passing grade in a 2021 report from the American Society of Civil Engineers, a low mark for the nation’s second-most-populous state with a reputation for bravado. The multibillion-dollar situation has grown only more dire, as the underground problems erupt into Texans’ everyday lives.
Read more from Jayme Lozano Carver & Pooja Salhotra of The Texas Tribune: https://grist.org/drought/texas-water-infrastructure-is-broken-jeopardizing-quality-and-supply-for-a-growing-state/.