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“Customers no longer need to boil water before drinking, cooking, and making ice. Water quality testing submitted to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality has confirmed that tap water meets all regulatory standards,” the city said in a statement.
“The boil water notice has been rescinded. The water is safe to drink, brush your teeth, etc. I appreciate your patience,” Mayor Sylvester Turner (D) posted on Twitter.
The city’s 276 schools, which serve nearly 200,000 students, were closed Monday and Tuesday, as were a half-dozen smaller school districts nearby that rely on Houston’s water.
Turner had said the city issued the boil water order late Sunday after pressure dropped below state-required levels that morning at a city water purification plant because of a failed transformer and backup transformer.
Texas allows cities 24 hours to issue a boil water order. Still, some residents and community leaders criticized the city for not alerting them to the problem sooner.
The mayor said he would consult with Department of Homeland Security officials about how the city alerted residents to the problem. He said the water filtration site had received regular maintenance, but promised that an outside team would also conduct a diagnostic review of the transformers.
While areas surrounding Houston have issued boil water orders in recent months and other Texas cities have issued them this year, Houston has only issued three in recent years, Turner said: during the statewide freeze and power crisis in February 2021, after a water main break in 2020, and this week.
Houston is Texas’s largest city, led by Turner and other Democratic officials in a state dominated by Republicans. Water issues have plagued several cities in recent years, from Baltimore to Flint, Mich., and Jackson, Miss.
Last month, the Environmental Protection Agency launched an investigation into whether Republican-run Mississippi state agencies discriminated against the state’s capital city by refusing to fund improvements for its failing water system that led to water pump failures, a loss of running water and boil water orders that stretched from summer into fall.
