Tom Bailey had just finished his morning routine of checking the town\u2019s three water well sites when he got a call from a resident: Water was coming out of the road.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The entire road was wet.<\/p>\n
\u201cWater was just boiling up in the middle of the road,\u201d Bailey said. \u201cNot normal. Not normal at all.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cI felt disappointed in myself,\u201d Bailey said. \u201cIf it\u2019s my repair and my repair failed, then I did something wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n
The repeated line breaks were not under Bailey\u2019s 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\u2019s public works director in January. His start date followed a disastrous water crisis that left Zavalla\u2019s roughly 700 residents without drinking water for 10 days and forced the town\u2019s water department to work on Christmas Eve.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s so much in disrepair,\u201d Bailey said. \u201cIt\u2019s a daily balance.\u201d<\/p>\n
Zavalla\u2019s 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 \u2014 if it exists at all.<\/p>\n
The Lone Star State\u2019s drinking water infrastructure barely received a passing grade in a 2021\u00a0report<\/a> from the American Society of Civil Engineers, a low mark for the nation\u2019s 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\u2019 everyday lives.<\/p>\n Read more from Jayme Lozano Carver<\/a> & Pooja Salhotra<\/a><\/span><\/span> of The Texas Tribune:\u00a0 https:\/\/grist.org\/drought\/texas-water-infrastructure-is-broken-jeopardizing-quality-and-supply-for-a-growing-state\/<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Tom Bailey had just finished his morning routine of checking the town\u2019s 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…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1865,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1417","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/environmental-justice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1417","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/environmental-justice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/environmental-justice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/environmental-justice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1865"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/environmental-justice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1417"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/environmental-justice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1417\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1418,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/environmental-justice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1417\/revisions\/1418"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/environmental-justice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1417"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/environmental-justice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1417"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/environmental-justice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1417"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}