POTEET - After nearly 30 hours without it, water service finally returned to the city of Poteet on Tuesday.
A water pump to the city’s only active well broke Monday morning.
City officials are telling residents they still need to boil the water before drinking it, as the city continues to work with the state to make sure the water is safe.
With drinking water only available by the bottle for the second straight day, restaurants in Poteet were closed, with one exception.
“Every day - I'm open," said Alicia Guerra, owner of Mi Casa Mexican Restaurant.
Guerra said she never thought about closing, not even as she was driving up to San Antonio at four o’clock in the morning to buy 40 gallons of water, and just as many pounds of ice.
“It’s hard on my employees and it’s hard on me, but we have bills to pay,” explained the restaurant owner.
Guerra said the water outage took her by surprise in part because she thought the city had a back-up water tower.
Poteet actually has three water towers. However, one of the towers has no well attached it, the other one has a leaky water tank. So when the pump went out at the third tower; the city was left dry.
"There was nothing anyone could do about it,” said Poteet city administrator LaNell Matthews. “It just happened."
While the broken water pump is still under warranty, Matthews said the city does not have the money to fix the leaky tank or dig a new well at the other towers.
Matthews said she is working on securing a $750,000 federal grant to fix the leaky tank.
Until that happens, the city remains one break away from no water.
