City Officials Give Update on Discolored Water in San Angelo

SAN ANGELO, TX— The Director of Water Utilities spoke Thursday on the discolored water issue in San Angelo.

Over the past couple weeks, San Angelo residents have noticed that their water has had a yellow tint. The City of San Angelo has been hard at work trying to clean the system by flushing fire hydrants and adjusting the mix of water, said John Kaufman, Director of Water Utilities.

What has been going on is not just affecting San Angelo, but Abilene, Midland and other surrounding towns.

Kaufman spoke with San Angelo LIVE! to give an official update on what happened and what is being done to address it.

“We received a “slug” of water in August, we think because of the (O.H. Ivie Reservoir) turnover due to the flooding," Kaufman said. "When a lake “turns over,” the contents from the bottom come to the top, and the contents on top go to the bottom. It is a natural occurrence and caused a lot of turbulence in the lake."

The slug is simply a large volume of water and, in this case, this slug was rich in organics and a mineral called manganese. Both the organics and manganese can cause the discoloration.

“Currently, we are getting much better water from Ivie, and we’ve been maximizing ground water usage,” Kaufman said. “The problem is the water that was discolored is in our distribution system, and we’re working feverishly to pull it out by flushing hydrants and going to different spots where we’re seeing higher concentrations of it.”

This is not something the water treatment plant can remove, but it’s also not toxic and considered more of a nuisance, Kaufman said.

“Manganese in low concentrations can make the water look yellow, and in higher concentrations can make it look rusty. The organics can also make the water look yellow,” said Kaufman. “Neither one of those are a particular problem with toxicity or anything like that. So, the drinking water quality is fine.”

Kaufman understands that residents are upset and reiterated that they are working to return the water to normal.

There is currently not a timetable for how long the water will remain discolored, but the yellow water has moved to more of the southern part of San Angelo and, while it is still everywhere, it is slowing dissipating. The City can only flush so much water out of the hydrants at a time.

“There is so much water in those pipelines, it can take a while to flush it out,” Kaufman said.

In an email, Shane Kelton, the Director of Public Works said:

"We are currently using our Hickory water supply at its maximum allowed rate to assist with the issues we are seeing with the Ivie supply. We have also increased our daily testing of the Ivie raw water supply so we can better catch potential issues before it would work its way through the treatment process and enter the distribution system."