Weather | Sports | Forums | Comics | Classifieds | Calendar | Movies
But officials warn residents to keep boiling while the county tests for bacteria after an 84-inch water main broke.
By JAMES THORNER, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times, published March 22, 2003
Taps were flowing again Friday for about 3,000 Pasco County households deprived of water after Thursday afternoon's line break.
But until the county can test water samples for bacteria, residents were urged to boil water until at least 2 p.m. today.
"It takes 24 hours to run these samples," Assistant County Administrator Doug Bramlett said Friday. "Saturday's the earliest we can have the lab techs come in and read the results."
The county is poised to handle inquiries today about whether water is safe to drink without boiling. Utilities staffers will be working today and can be reached by calling (727) 847-8144. At night, the number rolls over to fire rescue.
Pasco spent Thursday night restoring water to its customers following a massive break on a decades-old, 84-inch concrete line on the Bexley Ranch east of the Suncoast Parkway.
The pipe belongs to Tampa Bay Water, the regional utility that sells water to most of Pasco, Hillsborough and Pinellas counties.
In Pasco, the break left neighborhoods near State Road 54, from the parkway to Little Road, high and dry.
They include Wyndham Lakes, Parker Point, Longleaf, part of Trinity, Ellington Place, Fairway Springs and Seven Springs. By about midnight Thursday, water was flowing freely again.
Worst hurt was Pinellas, where hundreds of thousands of customers lost water pressure and were forced to deal with shortages until the line is fixed in about five days.
Trinity Elementary School coped with the drinking water warnings by covering all its drinking fountains and trucking in giant bottles and jugs of water. Whenever they got thirsty, students filled cups from the bottles stationed in their classrooms.
"We had absolutely no problem," principal Kathryn Rushe said. "We have enough water in case we need to do it Monday and Tuesday, too."
George Doepp, a retiree living in the Seven Springs neighborhood just east of Little Road, lost water at 4 p.m. It was restored before he went to bed after 11 p.m.
Still, Doepp and his wife, Julia, made sure none of what he described as "tinted, gray water" touched their lips. They set the kettle to boiling and ran out for bottled water.
"We even took water that was boiling, put it in the sink and brushed our teeth with it," Doepp said Friday morning.
John Covas noticed the problem Thursday as he tried to sprinkle his grass seedlings in his front yard in Fairway Springs.
"I thought it was a valve, but that was okay," Covas said. "I said to Betty, that's my wife, 'Put a gallon in a kettle so we'll have it."'
With a little back pressure still left, they were able to fill the kettle. "Then we boiled that right away," he said.
Bottled water was important for restaurants, but equally important was a reliable supply of bagged ice. Dish washing was fine owing to the high heat generated by the machines' sanitizing systems. Mike Sowards, general manager of Seven Springs Golf and Country Club, said his biggest concern was having enough water for two banquets scheduled for Friday night.
"Most likely we'll go the whole weekend without using our tap water just as a precaution," Sowards said.
A county health inspector came to take water samples from another country club restaurant, that at Heritage Springs south of SR 54, Friday.
Since the restaurant serves no dinners or breakfasts, the water warnings caused only minor inconveniences for Friday's lunch crowd. There was no tap water swirling with ice. Everything was bottled.
"Certainly we're not serving drinking water. Bottled water is the rule of the day," general manager Mitch Krach said.
Pasco utility officials said the 84-inch line broke as Tampa Bay Water flushed the conduit after getting complaints about cloudy water.
Bramlett suspects the line was "ready to fail" since Tampa Bay Water, even before the accident, had planned to replace sections of the reinforced concrete line first laid in the 1950s and '60s.
In one sense, the line burst at the right time. Bramlett said the county completed a new 24-inch line just two weeks ago, a line that allowed Pasco to bypass the broken section.
Otherwise, two neighborhoods on Gunn Highway, Parker Pointe and Wyndham Lakes, could have been dry for days and reliant on water trucks, Bramlett said.
On Friday, Bramlett's employees staffed phone banks to reassure Pasco residents from outside the no-water zone who wondered whether they, too, had to boil.
But Doepp was fairly laid back about his two days of boiling and bottles.
"What are you going to do?" he said. "It's better than being in the war zone."