*Austin STILL Needs Water*
People all over Central Texas have been without running water since February 15th, when winter storm Uri bore down on our region and exposed the true lack of preparation, planning, and response from all levels of our government and our utility providers. Since the storm broke on Feb 19th, and we finally got a chance to leave our homes (which for many of us had been without power for days), Austin Needs Water has been delivering water to people without. At first, it was nearly everyone in the city that needed water; there were burst pipes and low pressure in the entire system. We created a website for people to enter in their outage information, and began dispatching trucks with 275-gallon water tanks to drive to those locations and let people fill up whatever vessels they had for holding water. A full 275 gallon tank weighs 2200 lbs. The consumer grade pumps that we have been able to secure are slow. It is an extremely time and labor intensive task to physically move clean water to people. But it needed to happen.
It still needs to happen. What we've found in the unfolding of this crisis is that even though water has been “restored”, there are still thousands of households who continue to lack access to running water. Entire apartment complexes are without due to burst pipes. The plumbing in each individual building is very often burst in the units themselves, meaning that plumbers must move building by building, finding what’s broken and fixing it, everything, before water service can be resumed to that building. Then on to the next building. And because plumbing has burst all over town, and the pool of skilled tradespeople and the parts necessary are extremely limited, the timelines for restoration are often weeks in the best of cases. To compound these already dire straits, there is no centralized information source about who needs water where. Who is without, who has limited but still non-drinkable, and who is fully restored. We have become the de facto data source for this information, through online outreach and actual boots on the ground asking residents individually about their water situation.
WE NEED YOUR HELP TO MAKE SURE THAT PEOPLE HAVE ACCESS TO CLEAN WATER
Our funding is community driven, and the needs that we are meeting are great. Though we are recruiting volunteers as best we can, we are getting to the point where we need to hire people to make sure that we have water going out, all day every day. Because the need is there, and we are the people meeting that need. Any donation helps. Any volunteer time helps. Everything helps, and now more than ever we need to help each other to ensure that no one in our community is lacking in the most basic necessities for human dignity.
*Austin STILL Needs Water*
To report a water outage, volunteer, give money, or contact us, then visit our website, Austin Needs Water.
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