MEMPHIS, Tenn. — While MLGW customers are under a boil water advisory, some people don’t have any water to boil at all, creating problems for people in both northern and southern Shelby County.
Some of these people say they’ve been without water since Wednesday, boiling snow to get by.
Susan Hatfield, who’s been without water since Wednesday, lives in Shelby Forest and says her neighbors are in the same waterless situation.
“It’s almost like a test, whether or not we’re going to pass it,” said Hatfield.
But they’re not alone. To the south, in the area of Riverdale and Holmes, we talked to other people who said they’ve been without water for more than a day too.
Hatfield says one of the biggest frustrations has been the lack of communication, not knowing what’s going on.
“There’s an electric outage map, but there’s not a water outage map,” Hatfield said. “There’s nothing to show us what’s broke, where it’s broke, how it’s broke, what’s being done about it.”
We took her concerns to MLGW.
“I live in Shelby Forest; I can confirm we are without water,” said Nick Newman, vice president of engineering and operations. “The issue we’ve got with Shelby Forest is it’s a higher elevation, so as you have to pump water up a hill as you reduce pressures it’s going to have a difficult time getting water pumped up higher elevations, so that’s the reason why they saw this issue first.”
As for the issues off Riverdale, Newman says they’re “struggling with that one, to be honest.”
“We have teams out trying to find a water main break,” Newman said.
Hatfield says while she’s thankful to have power, now she needs answers as to when they’ll have water back.
“We’ll cope with it one way or another,” Hatfield said.
MLGW could not say when they expect the water to return.
