More than 100,000 El Paso residents left with little to no water after main break | Texas

More than 100,000 residents of the Texas border city of El Paso are left with little or no water after a major outage over the weekend, and operations are expected to take until midweek to return to normal, officials said.

The 36-inch water main break occurred late Saturday night in El Paso, a city of about 700,000, officials said. El Paso Water official Gilbert Trejo called the incident “an event of unprecedented magnitude.” He said the outage was made even more effective because of “the way the pipeline is designed and the different connections of smaller lines to it.”

Officials said that a warning was issued to boil water and water distribution centers were established.

Classes were canceled at more than a dozen schools in the El Paso Independent School District on Monday due to the outage. Other schools in the area remained open but were under a boil water advisory.

Trejo said approximately 38,000 customer connections were out of service due to the outage, meaning more than 100,000 residents were affected. More than 15 water tanks were “essentially depleted,” he said.

He said there wasn’t enough information yet to determine what caused the outage.

Trejo asked for patience as he makes repairs and goes through the process needed to get the water flowing again.