water_glassTechnically, there was a treatment failure at the Elm Fork water treatment plan on Dec. 10, says Randall Payton, the assistant director of operations for Dallas Water Utilities. But, when I talked to him this morning to follow up Friday’s post, he emphasized that the failure, involving a treatment technique, was not serious and that city water was always safe to drink. He says state regulators agreed with that assessment, classifying what happened as “non-acute.”

In this, city officials were not required to do anything more by state law than to report the failure to the state and to notify customers within 30 days. The city fulfilled that requirement by sending 278,000 postcards to customers within three weeks. Payton says he has fielded 600 phone calls over the past couple of days from curious residents.

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