Austin Water says it hasn’t seen a major spike in pipe breaks during the recent cold snap. And it’s not clear whether a water main break yesterday in north central Austin was weather related.
While utility spokesman Jason Hill says breaks can happen anytime during freezing weather, he also says it’s a good sign that there haven’t been more problems so far.
“Worst case scenario, we could see a lot of water main breaks because of the cold snap," Hill says. "We're not seeing that right now so we’re pretty confident that we’ll be able to make it through this winter without any major casualties. But, just in case, we are poised to respond to do whatever we need to do to make sure that we don’t have water outages to our customers during these winter months.”
Hill says customers should drip water from faucets at a rate of about five drips per minute during freezing weather and know where their water shut off valve is in case of an emergency.
There's more information about how to protect pipes from bursting in the freezing temperatures at WaterWiseAustin.org.
