When Will Austin’s Water Crisis End?

Austin Water shared two relevant graphics this morning.

In the first, you can see that most of the city, as of right now, does not have water, with those of us that do have water having it at low pressure.

The second offers some clues as to when it might be back to full strength.

Per the tweet, and as you can see in the graph prior to midday on the 13^th (Saturday, when recognition of the impending storm began to set in), Austin wants to be above 100 million gallons of water in storage, and was recently stable closer to 125 million. As of this morning, we were at 32 million in storage, with production outpacing supply by nearly 25 million at midnight.

If production (green line) can rise to its peak of 185 or 190 million per day, where it was at midday on Wednesday, and maintain that while consumption (blue line) remains around 150 million, where it was for the latter half of yesterday, we could be back to normal (red line is storage) by the end of the day tomorrow, or at least have the supply to get back to normal once individual water mains have been fixed. But there’s no guarantee production can get to that level or stay at that level, and there’s no guarantee consumption will stay flat or has stayed flat. It will presumably rise as water service returns to more areas, with people looking for their first shower in days, filling up boiled pots of water to drink, letting faucets drip overnight tonight to prevent pipes freezing and bursting, etc. I’m not an expert on the situation, but I’d also imagine that more water main breaks will be exposed as the water turns back on—it sounds like there are broken pipes out there ready to leak if given the opportunity. This may have been part of what caused the spike Tuesday night. Ensuing spikes could be brief, and we may be in a trough right now with so many waterless, but the spike is a risk.

So, we’ll see. From that 32 million gallons in storage number, here’s when things could be back to normal if production exceeds consumption by various amounts, assuming things can go back to normal roughly when water supply reaches 100 million gallons. To be clear, I have no idea what constitutes a realistic production gap.