MEADE COUNTY, Ky. — Officials in Meade County say a "perfect storm" of cold weather and lack of water from an outside source led to widespread water outages this weekend.
"There was no way to avoid this, I wish there was," Brett Pyles, general manager of the Meade County Water District (MCWD), said on Tuesday.
On Monday afternoon, MCWD started cutting off water to those customers furthest away from its intake point, and those who lived uphill from the intake point.
The reason for doing this was to begin to pool water in the first of its three tanks, so that pressure could rebuild and water could eventually be restored to all customers.
Pyles says at the peak of the outages, about 2,500 of MCWD's 5,500 customers were without water.
As of Tuesday afternoon, roughly 1,000 people are still without water, and the entire county is under a boil advisory.
Pyles said they hope to restore water to everyone by midnight Tuesday but "might run into the night when demand decrease."
He says they are rated to get 1,200 gallons per minute from Hardin County Station 1 (their only intake source), but on Monday they were getting a little less then 1,000 per minute.
"We had no water to pump...it's like trying to fill an 8 oz. cup with 6 oz. of water," Pyles said.
Many people had no idea MCWD was going to shutoff service to rebuild its supply.
"To be honest, I’m not even mad they shut off the water. I’m more mad about the communication," Emily Redmon said, who had her water restored around 4:30 am Tuesday.
Redmon had a pipe burst on Christmas day, and had a plumber come fix it Monday afternoon. When he finished work and turned the water back on, it was only coming out in a slow dribble.
“No pressure. There was no build-up. They (the plumber) were questioning it too," Redmon said.
Pyles said they have been working on a system to notify people in a select zone before shutting off water, but there have been delays.
He says they also couldn't have put a message on their website because the company who runs their website for them was on holiday.
So, the only way for them to notify people was a Facebook post after most people had their water shutoff.
"It's kind of sad to to think in this day and age that we don’t have someone that can properly communicate, or could not have found a way to communicate better," Redmon said.
Pyles said they have been working to find a better system for getting their water.
Hardin County officials asked Meade County to cut back on water usage on Friday, but Pyles said that would have only made things worse.
"Then we would have just had a longer outage," Pyles said.
Pyles says they are about six months deep in the planning to add a second source of water to their overall system. That plan has gotten $7.5 million worth of funding and could be done in the next 2-3 years.
He added people from Louisville Water are going to take a look at the system Wednesday to see if they're missing anything and if anything should be done differently.
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