City of Abilene issues 2 to 3 hours capacity of treated water remaining. Immediate curtailment of consumption unless needed for drinking or cooking.

Reckon they will fix my broken pipes? 4 degree low expected. 9 currently with water dripping. Understand it’s due to electrical shortage?

About 30 Million to many people are putting a hurt on the grid..

Yeah. No s***
I'm assuming that everyone has wrapped up their pipes and spigots
like they've been harping on for weeks. ( my pipes stay wrapped and
the spigots get covered as soon as I have to start wearing a coat)

So if they cut off the power and take everything out of your hands,
why should they not be responsible for any damage caused by
their failure?

Boil water notice here in Breckenridge. I'm just thankful I still have water.

fill a bath tub now if you have not already

They say they gave us plenty of notice this was coming so we could be prepaired... I think they should take their own advice so we don't run out of power!

How do they not have generators at the water treatment plants...

Most times the volume of a water tower will hold through a power outage, not sure a generator is justified for the once in 10 years event. I know of two cases today the generators failed to work, one due to low nat gas pressure.

I wish more people understood this.

It’s too expensive. It’s too expensive. Make it cheaper.

Hey, why aren’t they prepared for this?!

And, I cannot see why the power plants are blamed, it’s not like they could add on and expand the plant once they got the forecast. Everyone would be pizzn and moaning about their bill if the power plants had spent the money five years ago to have extra on demand.

People want their cake and eat it too, then go sell it around the corner.

What people don't get it most of these power plants that are down, knew they would be tripping offline in this weather. They could have just said eff it and shut down before hand and start back up when it thaws. Instead they ran as long as they could into the storm to provide power for as long as possible. A MUCH riskier thing to do for their employees and facilities.

We have generators at all 8 fire stations...

The problem is we are shutting plants down in favor of the so called “green energy” scam. I can name 3 plants that shut down within 90 minutes of me right now. Put those back on line and I bet 90% of the people without power right now would have it. This is a epic failure at the highest levels of our elected officials by not seeing to it that we had infrastructure in place to handle events like this. Eye opening is putting it mildly!!!

I guarantee you every hospital surgery center has generators, they are a requirement.

How the water company doesn’t have them...maybe they do and just ran out of diesel?

All those commercial buildings in Abilene with fire sprinkler systems are gonna be without protection unless they have water tanks on site. That’s a lot of liability.

Wonder what's going to happen when we need a hydrant for a fire? This could get really bad...

I’m not sure but I’m pretty sure most Texas hydrants aren’t dry barrel hydrants so most are prob already froze and useless. If not they will be once the city can’t supply sufficient water pressure.

The majority of the citizens of Abilene piss and moan about property taxes, now they are getting a first hand on the job lesson that it takes money to fund the needed infrastructure.

I thought that was after a specific date, they went to the dry ones. It’s geographic?

I’m not 100% sure but the ones I’ve tested weren’t dry barrel. There are a lot of differences between here and up north especially when it comes to how deep water mains have to be buried. Some places require 6 ft underground but Most of Texas only requires a minimum of 3 foot. I’ve had to conduct flow test and exercise quite a few hydrants and I can’t recall doing a dry barrel hydrant that has a drain to get the water out of the body of the hydrant.

On dry barrel hydrants (the majority if what we have in Texas ), the barrel drains automatically through weep holes that open when the stem is fully closed.

Even in areas where freezing is not a problem, dry barrel hydrants are used because they can break off at ground level without causing a water leak.

Interesting. I thought they had to be manually drained.

Well...

We are finding out right now how it's going to go.

Structure fire in my district. Just got a text from a guy that drove in tonight for his shift tomorrow. He's listening to the radio traffic. Sounds like they are pretty much just trying to protect exposures. They are getting some water from a hydrant but low pressure.