Firefighters helplessly watch home burn as power outage cuts off water, Texas city says

Firefighters watched helplessly as a house fire burned after power outages shut off a Texas city’s water supply, officials say.

“It’s not in the nature of firefighters to watch a house burn,” Abilene City Manager Robert Hanna said during a news conference Tuesday. “They had to watch that house burn. There’s not much they could do except make sure the other houses around it didn’t catch fire.”

Before the Monday night fire, Abilene city officials had urged residents to limit water usage because of weather-driven power outages affecting all three of the city’s water treatment plants. Within hours, the city of about 125,000 was without water, officials said.

About an hour after Abilene lost water, the fire erupted at a home near Abilene Christian University, the Abilene Reporter News reported. Firefighters initially battled the fire before largely abandoning efforts to save the home due to low water pressure, the newspaper reported.

“We had one fire hydrant that was able to pull minimum flow out,” Hanna said. “It was like running a garden hose on it. There just wasn’t any pressure behind it.”

Officials said the fire was caused by a wall heater, KTAB reported. The home was destroyed, the news outlet reported.

The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which manages the state’s energy grid, has struggled to maintain supply to millions of residents as historic cold grips much of the state and country. The council has asked power companies to implement rotating blackouts to prevent the system from failing.

Abilene is 150 miles west of Fort Worth.

What happened to Fort Worth’s water supply? Over 200,000 customers without clean water