Don’t drink tap water without boiling it, city says. Break floods Wichita neighborhood

A major Wichita water main break Thursday afternoon has made the entire city’s tap water unsafe to drink.

At around 3 p.m., the city issued a boil advisory, meaning water should be boiled for a minute before drinking or using in food preparation.

The scope of the main break is not yet known, but all of the city’s water customers lost water pressure, which can lead to bacterial contamination.

The state of Kansas also issued a warning for several water systems in Sedgwick and Butler counties that buy water from the city of Wichita, which supplies water to more than half a million people.

The area in the city that experienced the most immediate impact from the break reside in the neighborhood near 17th and I-135, where residents trudged through flooded streets and parking lots searching for answers.

“I’d sure like to know exactly what happened,” said LeeArthur Pink, a resident in the McAdams Neighborhood who had water within a few feet of his front door. “It’s flooded all over down here. There’s homes, there’s apartments, there’s churches, there’s homeless people living in tents — this could have been really bad.”

Most of the water drained into the floodway canal that runs along I-135. But a steady flow ran into driveways and streets, flooding intersections along 17th Street from Mathewson to Hydraulic. The city blocked several exit and entry ramps onto the highway near a site where water was gushing out of the ground.

The Eagle previously reported on critical state of the city’s aging water infrastructure in 2019, based on an engineering study that found the entire system was at a “significant risk” of failure. It found 100% of the city’s raw water pipes were in “very poor” condition as of 2017.

Deferred maintenance has piled up over the years, and fixing the existing infrastructure is expected to cost hundreds of millions of dollars in the next decade, The Eagle found.

“The problem was with the distribution system,” King said. “Once it leaves the water treatment plant, it goes out into pipes that then feed into the individual neighborhoods and homes. That’s where this problem was.”

He said he doesn’t yet know exactly how old the pipe is that broke.

“My sense is it’s not 100 years old, but it could be decades old,” he said.

City of Wichita water customers should take the following precautions until the boil advisory ends:

▪ Boil water for one minute prior to drinking or food preparation or use bottled water.

▪ Dispose of ice cubes and do not use ice from a household automatic ice maker.

▪ Disinfect dishes and other food contact surfaces by immersion for at least one minute in clean tap water that contains one teaspoon of unscented household bleach per gallon of water.

▪ Water used for bathing does not generally need to be boiled.

▪ Supervise children while they’re bathing and make sure water is not ingested.

▪ Persons with cuts or severe rashes may wish to consult their physicians.

Alan King, the city’s public works and utilities director, said the city is still searching for a cause of the break. One possible source is an Evergy power interruption at the city’s water treatment plant, which shut down equipment and pumps.

“When we started things back up, the equipment back up, we noticed we were losing pressure,” King said. “The pressure never went to zero. That’s important, because when your pressure goes to zero, there’s the potential that contaminants in the groundwater surrounding the water main could seep into the water mains.

“We did not go to zero. We remained pressure at all times.”

King said the city was still below the minimum safe pressure in some parts of the system at 3:30 p.m. on Thursday. A boil advisory can only be rescinded by the Kansas Department of Health and Environment after testing for contaminants. The city has not said how long that would take.

“We think we know which areas were experiencing the worst of the problems, but to be safe, to err on the side of safety, we’re going to go ahead and make it citywide,” King said.

“What it is is an attempt to be extra safe and for people to be able to use the water in a way that there is no chance of it causing any health problems.”

Wichita hasn’t issued a boil advisory since the 1990s, King said. He said the water main break may be associated with pressurizing the system after it went down.

“There is the potential when you have high volumes of water right up next to a road that . . . you could wash it away,” King said. “We have not seen any evidence of that yet, erosion.”

At the scene of the gushing water on the side of the highway, and in the neighborhood surrounding the Tabernacle Church of God, visible water erosion cut out some of the hillside along I-135 and the sidewalks along the streets.

Other public water supply systems under a boil advisory due to the break are Sedgwick County Rural Water Districts 1, 2 and 3, Benton, El Paso Water Company (city of Derby), Valley Center, Rose Hill and Kechi.

This story was originally published October 7, 2021 at 3:34 PM.