BIXBY, Okla — City of Bixby crews installed a temporary booster pump station which allowed them to disinfect and flush the water system.
That process was completed early Saturday afternoon.
Around 2:00 p.m. crews started going door-to-door to reconnect meters and restore water service.
Now with the water back, residents are under a boil order until July 26th.
RELATED STORY: Boil order issued for Bixby neighborhood waiting for water restoration
Craig Poindexter, who lives in the area, said he is happy to finally have water again.
He said it's been about ten days since they last had water and there are two things his family is looking forward to now.
“Man a really good shower. A 5-10 minute shower would be phenomenal. I think we might aim for that. And then it might just make watering you know the flowers the plants the trees keeping everything alive again I think that will be one of the go-to things for what we have set up", Poindexter said.
He said after having gone through this ordeal, his family is going to be more aware of how much water they use in the future.
“Going through this when you’ve had to think about every single gallon you use because you're taking it from one point to another to use it for toilets being flushed and dishes being done and very gallon counts you don’t just turn everything on and use it willy nilly", Poindexter said.
He hopes everyone, even beyond Bixby, is more water conscious because this could happen to anyone.
According to a social media post by Bixby's Mayor, Brian Guthrie, the water issues started on July 10th when the Wagoner Rural Water District Four opened their emergency water valve.
Sometime after that, the line suffered a break.
Mayor Guthrie said on July 13th, Bixby crews discovered the valve was still open and immediately closed it.
The result, over two hundred eighty-five thousand gallons of water drained from the tank leaving it almost empty.
This left air in the system which led to pump problems.
Residents were using portable showers, portable restrooms, and bottled water to get by.
RELATED STORY: Restrooms, showers set up for Bixby residents without water
Poindexter said he plans to keep bottled water in his front yard for residents during the boil order.
“Even though the water is turned on it doesn’t mean that we have access to drinkable water right away. You have to boil it and then you have to get it to the temperature you want to drink it", Poindexter said.
He said this isn't the end of the issue, he wants to see protections put in place to make sure this doesn't happen again.
“To have backups for their water so that if there’s one part that fails and goes down or has a leak or a main break, there’s something to back it up because if we don’t have redundancies in place this could happen anywhere at any time", Poindexter said.
Guthrie said in the summer of 2021, the same residents experienced low water pressure and a contract was signed on July 11th to fix the problem.
It's supposed to be done in three to four months.
Guthrie said coincidentally this outage happened before they could complete that.
Crews were only able to reconnect meters if someone was home, if a resident was not home and they still need water restored the city said to call 918-366-8294.
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