Millions of people in Montgomery and Prince George’s counties are urged to only use water for essential tasks because of a power issue at a WSSC Water filtration plant.
A power outage at the Potomac Water Filtration Plant, WSSC’s largest plant, affected the plant’s ability to operate, the utility company said Tuesday morning. That plant supplies drinking water to 1.9 million WSSC customers.
Power has been restored to one of two power feeds the plant uses, but the process to bring all of the systems back online takes time, WSSC said just before 1 p.m. The utility said customers should still conserve water until normal water production has resumed.
WSSC asked customers to do the following to conserve the water that has already been treated:
- Take shorter showers and quickly turn off faucets immediately after use
- Do not use any water for plants and grass outside, including lawn irrigation systems
- Limit flushing toilets (i.e. do not flush after every use)
- Limit using washing machines and dishwashers
As of now, WSSC said the water is safe and there’s no need to boil it before use. WSSC said it’s asking its customers to conserve water to try and prevent the need for a future boil water advisory in the area.
The plant has two power feeds and can operate fully with either one. But WSSC said one feed was taken out of service in mid-September for routine maintenance with Pepco, meaning there was no working backup when the second power feed had issues.
“Normally, we do have two sources. We have redundancy and resiliency for this very reason,” Lyn Riggins, a spokesperson for WSSC Water, told News4. “[One power feed] needed to come down a couple weeks ago for routine maintenance and now we have an issue with the other one. So that is why we’re in this situation.”
Pepco said it’s working with WSSC to restore operations, and its initial findings show an issue with WSSC equipment caused the outage.
In response to a question from News4, WSSC said the power issue was not the result of a cyber attack.
The plant draws water straight from the Potomac River and produces between 100 and 120 million gallons of drinking water per day, WSSC said.
Another WSSC plant is still operational and currently producing 90 to 95 million gallons per day, but that’s not enough to meet the 170 million gallons per day needed to meet demand, the utility said.
