System update leads to W’boro water boil notice

Around 11:30 p.m. on Friday, June 14, Whitesboro residents began receiving notifications from the City of Whitesboro that the town had issued a water boil notice. 

Earlier that day, the computer that runs the Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system, a software program that communicates between the city water tower and the water wells, experienced an automatic system update. Despite false-positive readings appearing on city worker cell phones, the SCADA system did not come back up after the update.

As citizens use public water, the water pulls from the city’s water tower. If the tower reaches a certain level, the water wells kick in to help fill it, ensuring the tower maintains adequate water pressure. With the SCADA system out of operation, the wells weren’t getting the signal to refill the tower.

“An alarm started sounding around 9:30 Friday night,” Whitesboro City Administrator Julie Arrington said. “That’s when our on-call guy realized there was an issue. We worked until about 12:30 that morning to figure out what was going on and how to resolve it.”

The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) requires that city water maintains a water pressure minimum of 20 PSI (pounds of force per square inch). If water pressure falls below that, a city is automatically required to issue a boil water notice.

“It’s really out of an abundance of caution,” Arrington said. “Water systems will create a vacuum that will suck water from pools, sewer systems, broken lines – that’s why the city is required to have backflow prevention systems, to protect our systems and our citizens.”

If the city water system was to pull from these other areas, public water could be contaminated. This is why a public statement from the city read, “To ensure destruction of harmful bacteria and other microbes, water for drinking, cooking, and ice making should be boiled and cooled prior to use for drinking water or human consumption purposes.”

The City of Whitesboro maintains a list of at-risk residents (mainly elderly and medically critical patients) that may need assistance at times like these. City staff personally contacted these people and checked on them each day of the notice to ensure they had what they needed. As for the rest of its citizens, the city notified KXII TV; posted to social media, its website and legal posting areas; delivered letters to restaurants; and posted on CodeRED, a cloud-based software program that alerts communities about local emergencies.

“We posted everywhere we were required to, and everywhere we could think of,” Arrington said. “The only thing we can’t do is go door-to-door. We have 2,000 water meters in town and nine employees. We’d still be knocking on doors.”

Monday morning, test samples were taken from the city’s water supply and delivered to a TCEQ-certified lab in Sherman. Tuesday morning, the city received word they could rescind the notice. 

The effects of the notice could be seen throughout town, from dining establishments unable to serve iced and water-based beverages (like tea and lemonade) to local stores sold out of bottled water. Summer sports camps which usually provide water to participants requested campers to bring their own bottled water to daily events. 

This water boil notice is the first Whitesboro has had to issue, as far as employees at City Hall can remember. To avoid such an occurrence in the future, city staff has already changed the computer system to a manual backup so a future system update can be scheduled and monitored. They are also looking into other ways to receive alerts that will notify them if the system isn’t working.

Whitesboro’s water boil notice came just a day after Collinsville issued one for its citizens. According to Collinsville City Administrator Dannielle Talley, workers were replacing aging water lines behind City Hall. The work resulted in low water pressure, which constituted a water boil notice. Collinsville’s notice was rescinded two days later.

To sign up for CodeRED emergency notifications via phone and/or email, visit www.whitesboro.org/community/page/codered-signup