DAVID GREENE, HOST:
After historic flooding in Austin, Texas, that city's 1 million residents have been told to boil their drinking water. Mose Buchele of member station KUT has more.
(SOUNDBITE OF WATER RUSHING)
MOSE BUCHELE, BYLINE: The water rushing into Austin reservoirs has the look of chocolate milk. It's been so churned up by flooding that it's brown, silty. And when it goes to Austin's treatment plants, it takes a lot longer to filter. So on Monday, the city told people to conserve water and, as a precaution, to boil what they're going to use for drinking and food prep. You can probably guess what happened next.
MAGGIE CHAPMAN: My mom called me and was like, get water now. So that's why I'm here.
BUCHELE: Yesterday Maggie Chapman was one of a bunch of shoppers at a supermarket wheeling out bottles of water. The supply had improved from the day before, when shelves were bare after stores started to limit how many bottles people could buy.
CHAPMAN: It's just inconvenient at this point. But I start to think about, you know, just daily things that we use water - I hadn't even thought about.
BUCHELE: What kind of things? Some restaurants are closed. Cafes aren't serving. So you meet a lot of people desperate for coffee. And on a more serious note, the city of San Antonio sent up a water tanker to help keep the local jail supplied with drinking water. And the city of Austin worried about maintaining water pressure in its system.
GREG MESZAROS: We've been providing water for a hundred years. This has never happened to us. This is blowing our mind too.
BUCHELE: Greg Meszaros is the director of the city's water utility. He says after all that silt slowed water treatment, the city's system of pipes and reservoirs started to lose pressure. If it loses too much pressure, the city won't be able to spray water from hoses to fight fires. And water in pipes risks getting contaminated as microorganisms sneak into holes and openings they wouldn't normally access.
The good news, Meszaros says, is that water conservation is working. People in Austin are using less. More water is going into the system. And water pressure has improved.
MESZAROS: The one thing we can control is how much water we use. We can't control the weather, but we can control that aspect of it.
BUCHELE: He says if conservation continues and weather cooperates, things could start returning to normal by this weekend. If heavy rains kick up more silt in the river, this could last days beyond that.
For NPR News, I'm Mose Buchele in Austin.
(SOUNDBITE OF PIM MILES' "BLUE REEF") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
