Luling, La- With every Ice day comes conflicting tolls. School closures, Road closers, but worst of all frozen or busted pipes. Residents of St. Charles parish either had frozen or busted pipes.

” We take care of our water system. We go and fix all the leaks we can find so that we can get the water to every one of our customers. The last customer on the end of the line. But if their not taking care of their own business, we’re still going to fail.”

Residents of St.Charles Parish were asked by officials not run their water in order too keep pipes from freezing, and instead were ask to wrap or insulate their pipes. Both East and Westbank water facilities were at full capacity at the time and was trying to stop their corporation from having a full shut down.

” If everyone insist on running water to protect their pipes. There is a very real danger that you’re going to experience what all of our neighbors experienced which is low pressure, Firefighting will not be there, you won’t be able to drink the water, you won’t have water for your basic usage.”

A worker from The WaterWorks enterprise gave us the breakdown of the situation. Water maintenance was needed, cold weather caused frozen pipes that burst or cracked, people whose pipes burst had to call WaterWorks in order to have their water shut off.

This Month WaterWorks Director Robert Brou was on SCP Today’s show talking about the shutdown situation.

” The main issue with an event such as this is that when were trying to produce water and the customers are using more than we can produce,” Brou said.

“The limiting factor for a water system is the amount of water it can produce, the amount it can pump out into the system, and the amount it has in storage. When those limiting factors are exceed by the customers demand either through normal usage, through flushing water pipes to prevent freezing or through leaks. A system is in danger of dropping below minimal pressures and not being able to keep up that demand, which happened to a lot of our  neighbors.

Melanie Seal was among many whose pipes froze.

” We had like one layer of installation on them, but there on the north end of the house, so that one little layer of installation did not help so much.”

” We’ve been in that house for almost 17 years and we never had our pipes freeze. We always kind of wrapped them that way and so no we were not happily surprised.”