Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 13, 1994 TAG: 9402130138
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A1 EDITION: STATE
SOURCE: ROBERT FREIS STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG LENGTH: Medium
Taps began to run dry at noon, forcing officials to arrange for potable water to be trucked into town.
Although power was restored to the system by late afternoon, water may not begin to flow again until mid-morning today.
Bonnie Svrecek, Blacksburg's interim public works director, estimated another 48 to 60 hours may pass before the water is safe to drink untreated.
Meanwhile, 35,000 Blacksburg residents are being told to conserve water and to boil all drinking and cooking water for 10 minutes.
"It's fortunate this happened on a weekend. Otherwise, we'd probably be dealing with shutdowns of a lot of businesses," Svrecek said.
An extended loss of water service would have intensified the town's misery after Thursday's ice storm downed utility lines, destroyed trees and forced many residents from their heatless homes.
More than half of Blacksburg's homes and businesses were without power Saturday.
Town officials did close the system's largest customer, the Federal-Mogul plant, Saturday morning after water reserves emptied. But Svrecek said the plant is expected to resume production today.
Fresh drinking water was distributed Saturday night at the Blacksburg Community Center and the Blacksburg Middle School.
Town officials bought the water from the Radford municipal water plant, Svrecek said.
A similar interruption of water service has never happened before in Blacksburg, she said.
After the ice storm, the system was without power for more than 30 hours. By comparison, Hurricane Hugo knocked out power in 1989 for 14 hours, Svrecek said.
While the system was down, water could not be pumped from the New River through the filtration plant to Blacksburg's 5 million-gallon storage tanks.
Despite requests by the town for customers to conserve water, the system began to run dry in some parts of Blacksburg.
Svrecek said Blacksburg customers should curtail water use when pressure returns today.
"If we have a high demand initially, it will suck the tanks dry again. It's going to take a while to bring it back up."
Customers should also thoroughly boil water because it may contain relatively high amounts of sediments, she said.
In Christiansburg, system users lost water pressure in some areas, but no widespread outages were reported.
Pressure also disappeared on the Virginia Tech campus Saturday, but was restored several hours later during the late afternoon.
Tech spokesman Larry Hincker said the water outage could have caused enormous problems because of the use of steam for heat at the university.
A pumper truck was brought in to get water to the steam plant in case of a long outage, he said.
Also, a supply alert was declared Saturday for water customers in Pulaski County and the towns of Pulaski and Dublin.
Power outages reduced the operating capacity of the water plant that serves those communities. Officials called for water conservation, particularly in Pulaski.
Staff writer Todd Jackson contributed information for this story.
by CNB