Water Restored to 150,000 from Towson to Sparks

UPDATE (1:37 p.m.)—Requests to conserve water have been lifted after power has been restored to a water pumping station in Towson Saturday afternoon.

Kurth Kocher, a spokesman for the city Department of Public Works, said power to the station at a reservoir located at Hillen Road and Stevenson Lane was restored by BGE. No one lost water service.

"No one went out but we got pretty close," Kocher said.

The pumping station lost power to both of its feeder lines early Saturday morning. The reason for the outage is not currently known.

The pumping station at the Hillen Road facility pumps water from the reservoir on the site as well as to six water towers and tanks between Towson and Sparks. It serves about 150,000 people.

The outage meant that water could not be pumped to homes and to water storage tanks up the York Road corridor that service communities as far away as Sparks, Kocher said.

"Once those tanks are dry, that's it until the power comes back on," Kocher said, adding that they hope the situation will be resolved by later today.

The pumping station is undergoing $28 million in renovations to bring its two open air water storage tanks into compliance with current EPA regulations requiring that the tanks be completely enclosed.

The same station suffered a power outage in April 2010 after an electrical fire knocked out the same two feeder lines.

Water outages from that incident were reported from Lake Avenue to the south, Sparks to the north, Falls Road to the west and Old Harford Road to the east.

Kocher said work on the power lines to prevent such a recurrence is planned as a later part of the ongoing renovations to the facility.