Faucets Run Dry For More Than 1,000 Lake Area Residents
More than 1,000 permanent residents of North Lake Brownwood at Tamarack Mountain, Harbor Point and Thunderbird Bay are receiving emergency supplies of bottled water after the storage tanks that supply the system that furnishes water to those homes ran dry Monday afternoon.
Brent Bush, emergency management coordinator for Brown County, said he received a call from the regional office for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality in Abilene right after lunch Monday.
A shipment of 20 pallets of bottled water was scheduled to be sent to North Lake Volunteer Fire Department Tuesday evening, Bush said. The Brownwood-Brown County Health Department and the county’s emergency coordinator gathered donations and sent the bottled water to the North Lake Brownwood Fire Department to be handed out to the elderly and sick until a shipment from the state could arrive, Bush said.
Residents of the affected neighborhoods can pick up bottled water at the North Lake Fire Department. Housebound residents may call the fire department and request that water be delivered.
Bush said he and three representatives from the TCEQ’s regional office had tried to meet with the owner and operator of the water system on Monday evening, but that did not happen – even after they waited for three hours. Bush said because he didn’t have access to the facility, he could not determine what was wrong with the water system.
Bush said he did meet with the owner Tuesday morning and was told that the 185,000-gallon storage tanks would take 24 hours to fill. However, the TCEQ must decide whether the tanks need to boil the water before it is distributed to the public.
Bush and TCEQ officials met with representatives from the homeowner associations of all three areas Monday evening, and they made an official request for the state to furnish water.
