Pump Failure In North Carolina Sends Several Counties Offline

Pump problems at a North Carolina facility this month led to water emergencies in several counties.

"The city of Henderson lost power to all three of our high-pressure and distribution pumps," Mayor Eddie Ellington said Monday evening, per ABC11. "We have been working around the clock with our staff and technicians to resolve the problem as quickly as possible. We have an engineer on site that restored power to one of the pumps and continues to work on the other two at Kerr Lake Regional Water System. Our citizens and water users can rest assured that this issue will be corrected and we apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused."

The problems at Kerr Lake Regional Water Plant are a case study in how technical problems at a plant can affect drinking water service for thousands upon thousands of customers. The advisories were cancelled on Wednesday, according to the city website. The mayor told ABC11 that the water is now “safe in all aspects.”

After the pump problems began, a boil-water advisory went into place for Franklin County and parts of Granville and Vance counties, and mandatory water conservation went into effect for Henderson, ABC11 reported.

By Tuesday, the problem had affected “an estimated 54,000 users of Kerr Lake Regional Water System, including in Henderson, Vance County, Oxford, and Franklinton,” the report said.

Schools kept bottled water and hand sanitizer available.

Water officials worked at first to get pumps back online. At least one pump was already up and running by Tuesday, ABC11 reported.

"Our system is re-pressurizing and we believe that overnight we should be back to having system-pressure levels at more normal levels," Alan Thornton, Oxford city manager, said while the advisory was still in effect. "However, we're going to be under a boil water advisory for our citizens and for our customers. The advisory means that we recommend that you boil your water for a period of one minute vigorously."

Next came water testing and waiting for the results, the report said.

In the midst of the emergency, officials began pushing residents to conserve water.

"We buy our water from Kerr Lake. They're the ones having the issue, and we have our own water in elevated storage tanks, but we have a limited amount and there's no recovery date right now," said J.P. McCann with Envirolink of Vance County's system, per the report. "They don't have a time to tell us when the pumps are going to be back online. So right now all the water we have is what's in the towers. So that's why I'm asking county residents to conserve water."