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Courtney Bend power failure prompts precautionary water advisory and exposes notification gaps
Summary
A transformer failure at Courtney Bend Water Treatment Plant led the city to issue a precautionary advisory after systems lost power for about 11 hours; staff said 16 lab samples were taken, the Department of Natural Resources aided clearance, and officials acknowledged weaknesses in mass-notification that hampered rapid outreach to schools and hospitals.
Interim City Manager reported that the Courtney Bend Water Treatment Plant lost power at about 6 a.m. on Monday after a city-side transformer failed while the redundant feed was already out for preventative maintenance. "Courtney Bend Water Treatment Plant lost power on Monday morning about 6AM," the manager said, and staff restored power roughly 11 hours later.
City staff opened emergency interconnects with Kansas City to stabilize system pressure and collected 16 water samples at Courtney Bend for laboratory testing. "We were simultaneously pulling 16 samples," the manager said, and the samples were processed at the plant's certified lab. The city worked with the Department of Natural Resources during sampling and clearance; staff said DNR personnel could respond from a local office.
Officials framed their public message deliberately: the city issued an advisory, not a boil order. "The entire time, it was just precautionary," the Interim City Manager said, explaining that a boil order would require confirmed contamination or pressure below 20 PSI. The city said pressure thresholds were not recorded below that limit in a way that would mandate a boil order.
Staff also described operational and communications shortfalls the outage exposed. Officials said several notification platforms exist but do not interoperate and that the publicly subscribed Rave list lacks clear address linkage, making it difficult to target messages reliably. "We have... seven different systems that have the potential to push mass notifications, but, of course, none of them talk to each other," the manager said. Board members and district representatives urged development of a crisis-communication annex and direct contact lists for large users, including schools and hospitals.
On-site logistics included mutual-aid steps: municipal staff coordinated with hospitals and emergency services. Municipal services staff said CenterPoint Hospital received potable water via a tanker truck during the outage. "They had a tanker truck come in to attach to an external spigot... to provide them with potable water during the outage," a municipal services representative said.
City staff outlined next steps: after-action follow-up with neighboring utilities to ensure interconnect valves are operable, a review of mass-notification tools (including geofencing trade-offs with IPAWS and extraction limitations of proprietary vendors), and plans to add estimated restoration times (ETRs) to outage maps beginning in February. The board did not take formal action at the meeting; staff said they would return with drafts and recommendations for communications improvements and any procedural changes.
The board scheduled its next meeting for Jan. 15, 2026.
