Compounded By Untimely Transfer to Back-Up Power
March 4, 2021
The Ullrich Water Treatment Plant produces roughly half of Austin’s drinkable water and is crucial to keeping the city’s water system functioning.
Because of the plant’s importance, State regulations require the plant to either have access to a backup power source or a substantial amount of water reserves in case the plant sees an unexpected shutdown. Ullrich has both.
So when a tree limb fell on an electric line leading to a substation that powered Austin’s largest water treatment plant on Feb. 17, the plant should have transferred to emergency power to keep the plant operating and water production flowing.
Tom Pierpoint, Austin Energy’s vice president of electric systems, said the power utility monitored the outage to the substation from its control center. Operators were able to restore power to the substation within six minutes by isolating the damaged portion of the substation, Pierpoint said.
Power was not restored to Ullrich Water Treatment Plant for roughly three hours, according to Austin Water. Austin Water’s assistant director of operations, Rick Coronado said no one at the site could operate a manual gear switch installed in 1969 that could have switched the plant to backup power.
The exact sequence of events seemed to be unclear to both Austin Energy and Austin Water officials. Coronado said Austin Water staffers were not trained to switch the water treatment plant to a backup source of electricity – while Pierpoint said Austin Water should have known how to conduct such a task.
“For them to get out to the water plant with treacherous roads in such bad times, it was a challenge to get out there,” Pierpoint said.
Once power was restored at Ullrich, the plant had to be eased into full operations, a process that took about six hours, according to Austin Water.
The outage resulted in the plant operating below capacity for more than 10 hours, according to Austin Water. During that time, water drained rapidly from the city’s water reserves, bled by thousands of burst pipes and dozens of broken water mains.
“Water use was exploding,” Austin Water Director Greg Meszaros told the City Council this past week. “It was just climbing off the dial for us. Quite honestly, I didn’t believe the numbers, and I ordered some of our crews to go and physically check the reservoirs, particularly in the southwest where this was first starting, and verify that these numbers were correct. As we all learned, they were correct.”
In the weeklong winter storm, the loss of power at Ullrich represents an inflection point when the city’s power crisis became a water supply crisis.
The failure of dual redundancies at Ullrich helped trigger a citywide boil water notice and contributed to widespread loss of water pressure that included forcing the evacuation of many patients from St. David’s South Austin Medical Center.
It was “literally a perfect storm,” Austin Water’s assistant director of operations, Rick Coronado, said in an interview with the American-Statesman.
Broken water mains and pipes rapidly began depleting the Austin’s reserve water stored in massive reservoirs even before the outage. So when the power went out, there was little water left in reserve to keep the system pressurized enough to push water out of faucets, bathtubs and spigots.
“The outage compounded an already difficult situation of keeping up with leaks and system demand that ultimately depressurized the water system,” Coronado said.
Since the storm, Austin Water crews worked to fix hundreds of water main breaks. Meszaros said the water utility repaired roughly 40 to 60 breaks a day. The total number of water main breaks in the single weather event was roughly equivalent to the number Austin Water would see for an entire season.
Water service was restored to the full system this past Monday. On Tuesday, the boil water notice was lifted. And on Thursday, Austin Water lifted water use restrictions. Despite that, many Austin residents remain without water. On Thursday, Meszaros estimated that 200 to 400 apartment and condo complexes continue to lack running water because of burst pipes.
The Ullrich Water Treatment Plant was built in 1969 and has a rated design treatment capacity of 167 million gallons per day (MGD). The plant is a conventional lime softening design, with up-flow solids contact reactor type clarifiers, gravity filters, clear well storage, and has raw water and finished water pumping stations. The plant has undergone a number of expansions and renovations over the years. It was expanded to its current treatment capacity in 2006. Ullrich Water Treatment Plant is one of three water treatment plants serving Austin Water customers and it is the largest in treatment capacity.
The American Water Work’s Association has recognized Ullrich Water Treatment Plant with the President’s Award from the Partnership for Safe Water. This prestigious award has been given to an elite group of 30 plants across the country. The award honors the performance of a plant’s filters, which play a key role in filtering out harmful bacteria.
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