Just got a text from someone reporting brown water from the taps near 41st/Walker. No emergency outages reported on the Seattle Public Utilities map, nor recent nearby fires (hydrant use also can stir up the sediment – mostly rust – in the system).
Any time this happens at your residence/business, call SPU at 206-386-1800.
We have it here on walnut and arch. Just a block North East of 41st and holgate. I called SPU and they are suppose to have a water quality person in the neighborhood checking it out.
I’m the original reporter and we first observed this about 8:00am today (dark brown at first, quite a waker upper!), then spent a fruitless 30 minutes trying to clear out our lines with taps on. After calling SPU’s hotline # and leaving a message, we got a callback about an hour later and were told SPU is in the process of “flushing out water mains” which stirs up sediment that is then seen in homes. “The worst thing you can do is to keep trying to purge your system, because that keeps the sediment flowing. Don’t use any water for a couple hours so the remaining sediment has a chance to settle down”. In fact, that’s exactly what happened and we were running all clear by noon.
Thanks for the update. For newcomers, this was a BIG DEAL not that many years ago – after a while there had been so many brown-water reports in WS (which we documented here, so keep letting us know), they did a massive systematic flush over the course of weeks/months.
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