PUB TO PROVIDE SAN PEDRO WITH WATER PENDING REPAIRS

By Juan Montoya

After months of petitioning the Military Highway Water Supply Corporation, the City of Brownsville and even Cameron County, San Pedro residents will have clean water provided by the Brownsville Public Utility Board next week until the MHWSC board completes repairs on the system.

Hookup to the PUB is expected to be finished by the PUB and San Pedro residents sometime early next week. It will be months, residents were told, before the bids are let out, a contractor hired to do the work on the water system, and the problem fixed. Until then, PUB will provide the westside Brownsville residents with clean treated water.

The news came during a press conference called at the offices of the MHWSC Thursday.

For more than a year, San Pedro residents had complained about the greenish-yellowish tinge and funky smell coming from the water from their faucets. Children at Villa Nueva Elementary also had to stop using the water because of  apparent contamination in the system's lines.

Efforts by the MHWSC engineers and work crews to flush the system only removed a layer of the plaque inside the pipes and the rest of the residue remained. The only solution seemed to replace the entire section of the system's pipes with new conduits, an impossible demand on the fiscally-strapped utility.

All along, the residents have petitioned the board of the MHWSC, city, county and state officials – elected and unelected – to step forward and come to their aid. Letters to Texas Sen. Eddie Lucio and his equally worthless son Eddie Lucio III went unanswered. Residents also sent letters to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, and just about every other state agency having to do with drinking water.

The MHWSC has been under an agreed order to do something about the quality of the water since 2015. In that docket, the utility agreed that it had failed to assure that it reduce the levels of arsenic in its water.

During a meeting of the MHWSC, residents showed board members lesions on the backs of children that that the mothers said were caused when they came in contact with the water.

After months of pleading with the MHWSC board to come to an agreement with PUB while they came up with an answer to their water problems, the insistence of MHWS board members Juan Jose Lara, Rick Bennett, Jim Wells Jose F. Gonzales, Fernando Rangel Ramon Rosales Jr., and attorney Barry Jones finally paid off and the board approved the move.                                                                                                                                                                                                                              Residents were thankful to Cameron County Pct. 2 Commissioner Alex Dominguez who has been advocating on their behalf throughout the lengthy negotiations. Also playing an important role in improving the quality of water in San Pedro – which is inside the Brownsville city limits – was then-newly-elected District 4 commissioner Ben Neece and Commissioner At-Large "A" Cesar De Leon.

Their response was a stark contrast to that of  former District 4 commissioner John Villarreal and At-Large "B" commissioner Rose Gowen, who made a campaign stop there before the elections last May. At the time, both promising to help the residents. Villarreal lost and Gowen won, but after her victory she told residents there was "nothing" she could do.

"Now the school children of Villa Nueva Elementary will have good quality drinking water to drink," said one of those residents at the meeting. "The county doesn't operate the water supply company, but commissioner Dominguez has been there all along to help us with the problem. We are very grateful to him and the two city commissioners for their help. Until you don't have water, you don't know how important it is."

Rosales Jr., general manager of Military Highway Water Supply Corp., said during the news conference that as the water flow changes to east-to-west, turbulence in the water will stir up sediment. Combined with a change from groundwater to surface water, customers may notice a change in water color and taste.

“It’s still high-quality water,” he said.
He also stressed that residents will remain customers of Military Highway Water Supply Corp. and should call his office if they experience issues.

George E. Lazaro of Fulcrum Consulting Services, who is the engineer for Military Highway Water Supply Corp. projects, told the Brownsville Herald that a permanent solution is the water board’s loop project, which will allow flow back west from San Pedro and eliminate the system’s dead end. The board will go out for bids on the project in the spring, he said.

Rosales said it’s difficult to give a timeline on the loop project, but completion could take anywhere from 18 to 24 months.

"I think we have a good group from the city and county working on this and we're glad the people of San Pedro will finally have that problem solved," Dominguez said.