Central Texas cities using portable restrooms to keep water systems flowing for solar eclipse crowds

CENTRAL TEXAS (KWTX) - Central Texas cities are planning multiple strategies to make sure their water and wastewater treatment systems can sustain the expected influx of visitors for the upcoming Great American Eclipse.

Lampasas, Evant, Gatesville and Hillsboro are some of the smaller cities anxiously waiting for visitors to double or triple their populations April 8, the day of the total eclipse.

The four cities are reserving several portable restrooms to minimize the demand on their sewage treatment plants.

“We’ve been planning about 24 months now for the event, which has included what impacts there would be to our water and wastewater system,” Lampasas City Manager, Finley deGraffenried, said. “We think that with the deployment of just shy of 200 portable restrooms, that should help.”

The City of Hillsboro reserved 120 with the majority being in the downtown area, where the city expects a majority of visitors.

Mayor of Evant, Charles Weeks, said the city with a population of around 400 is expecting 500 to 1,000 visitors to flood the small town. He said the city will provide 50 portable restrooms and handwashing stations.

“A lot of the businesses in town are going to be closed, and they’re going to put their bathrooms off limit so they don’t have 9,000 people coming in trying to use the restrooms,” he said. “That’s what we’re hoping for anyway, try to minimize it that way because nobody knows what to expect. We’re preparing for the worst and hoping for the best.”

The City of Gatesville said there will be portable restrooms in the downtown area and the local H-E-B is also providing portable bathrooms in the parking lot.

The cities also said their public works and water crews will be all-hands-on-deck to repair any emergency water or wastewater issues that arise April 8.

DeGraffenried said Lampasas public works crews will be scattered throughout the area so that they will not get stuck in traffic on their way to an emergency.

“We’re not all at one location,” he said. “We actually have split, not only public safety crews but also public works crews on either side of Key Ave.”

However, Evant only has two city staff who are hired to fix broken water lines or issues, according to Weeks.

“We don’t have extra water crews,” he said. “If we have issues, we’ll have volunteers. There’s no doubt about that.”

Weeks said he also is reaching out to the state for additional resources.

“We’re hoping for some help for law enforcement and stuff from the state, but we’ve yet to get an answer on that,” he said.

The City of Gatesville said it does plan to have some extra staff on call or on duty for the water and wastewater treatment plants, but it is hoping the day will be business as usual.

“On the wastewater side of things, we’re just going to do business as normal,” Bobby Buster with the wastewater treatment plant of Gatesville said. “We’re going to have the on-call guy. We have backup pumps, just in case something does happen, and all the guys are available to come in. Monday is just a regular work day for us.”

“The only thing out of the ordinary that we’ll be doing on the water production side of it is that we have more operators on duty,” Zeb Veazey with Gatesville’s water plant said.

The city said the wastewater treatment plant is running between 65-75% capacity, and the water plant is running at about 40% capacity. They are not expected to run out of capacity or even go near it.

“As far as the pumpage capacities, the flows for the day, we expect those to be pretty close to the same,” Veazey said.

However, the actual eclipse will have a slight impact on the city’s unique wastewater treatment plant because it uses solar power.

“During the solar eclipse, we won’t make any solar power,” Buster said. “We’ll have to go back on the grid. We’ll go back full power on the grid.”

Just like Gatesville, City Manager of Hillsboro, Megan Henderson, said the city is not expecting the increased demand for water and wastewater treatment to be a problem for residents.

She said, based on research, the city expects a majority of visitors to arrive on the day of the eclipse and leave shortly after, so the overall impact on the systems should not be an issue.

“The big influx is going to be limited in duration, and we’re going to be able to then control the collection of these portable restrooms, the processing, all of that,” she said.

She said all caity employees will be on standby ready to repair any water lines or solve issues that may arise on April 8.

Whether water supply is a concern for these cities or not, they said the eclipse being in April is a huge relief for their utility systems.

“It’s spring right now,” Veazey said. “Temperatures aren’t hot. We’re getting some rainfall,so our daily pumpages and daily demand have been lower than normal. I would call this a slow time of year for us as far as production goes.”

“We tend to be troubled most by those (water line breaks) during times of extreme weather, extreme cold, when we’ve had wet weather and then it freezes and that causes the ground to expand,” Henderson said. “We get a lot of water breaks then. I am super glad that this eclipse did not happen in January or August. April is really a pretty good time in terms of having those kinds of challenges.”

All of the small cities are reminding residents to prepare right now for the crowds and influx of visitors by buying water bottles and food ahead of that weekend.

Most of all, the cities want their residents and visitors to have a safe and fun once-in-a-lifetime eclipse experience.

“he time for preparation is almost over, and now is the time for us to embrace, enjoy, and relax, and have a great event that we’ll all remember for the rest of our lives,” Henderson said.

Some of the cities expect to start setting up early next week.

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