Jerry Swick turned on a faucet at 6:30 on a Tuesday morning in October 2024 and nothing came out. He lives on Wolf Lane, outside Valley Mills, Texas, about thirty miles northwest of Waco, where the land opens up past the Bosque River and the houses sit far apart. His water comes from one well, run by a company called SRC Water Supply Inc. About fifty other households draw from the same well.
Swick called SRC. Someone confirmed an electrical failure at the well. He asked when it would be fixed. The representative couldn't say, and then, Swick told KWTX, the call ended.
That was October 15. The water came back on October 22, and not because SRC fixed anything.
What a week without water actually looks like
Cody and Haven Goodmanson have young children. For six days they couldn't shower, wash dishes, or wash hands at home. Their daycare bathed their kids. Haven described the way neighbors helped each other as something to be proud of. Cody said the absence of any repair plan left residents feeling neglected, which is a particular word to reach for about a utility that is legally obligated to serve you.
Jennifer Matthews Williams runs the Heart of Texas Equestrian Academy nearby and needs hundreds of gallons a day for the animals. Text messages from neighbors were her only reliable source of information about the well, she told reporters, because SRC had gone quiet.
The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality confirmed the electrical failure and delivered six pallets of bottled water on October 16. The City of Valley Mills opened a bulk-water fill station. To use it you needed your own containers, a copy of your SRC bill, and identification, plus some way to move several hundred pounds of water home. That left out anyone without a truck, anyone working during the hours the station was open, anyone who couldn't lift a full container.
This went on for six days.
The church
On day six, residents and business owners met at Top Hand Cowboy Church. By then the shape of the problem was clear. SRC either couldn't or wouldn't pay for the repair. The well needed a new pump and motor. What remained was who would buy them.
The church, the customers, and a local well company called Jurgensen Pump put the money together. A supplier rushed the equipment down from the Texas Panhandle. Crews installed it on October 21, and by late morning on the 22nd Jurgensen reported that all customers had running water again.
Seven days from failure to fix, with the fix paid for out of the customers' own pockets. Haven Goodmanson was right that what the neighbors did was something to be proud of. It was also the only thing moving at the speed the households needed.
The order that arrived on day three
On October 18, three days into the outage, the Public Utility Commission of Texas issued an emergency order compelling SRC to provide continuous and adequate service. Texas law already required that. The order restated the obligation in a form the commission could enforce later, while residents were still hauling jugs.
The commission affirmed the order in December 2024 and later found that SRC had not complied with it. The well had been running for two months by then, repaired by the customers rather than by the company the order was addressed to.
The commission operated on filings and hearing dates. The Goodmansons needed to know whether the kids could be bathed that day.
What the records already showed
October wasn't the system's first trouble. TCEQ enforcement records show a complaint about low pressure in July 2021, another about an outage that September, and a 2023 default order citing failures on minimum pressure, chlorine residual, boil-notice reporting, and compliance with an earlier agreed order. TCEQ assessed a $5,400 penalty.
The system is called Rolling Hills. One well, an operator with compliance problems documented across several years, and about fifty-one connections, which is not enough billing to fund a spare pump, a reserve account, or a second source. For the households that woke up dry on October 15, the failure was sudden. In the enforcement file it reads as the next entry in a pattern. Both descriptions are accurate.
After the water came back
Four months after the new pump went in, SRC told TCEQ it intended to abandon all eleven systems it operated across nine counties, 431 connections in all.
On April 3, 2025, the commission appointed a temporary manager, Mark Patterson, through Patterson Water Supply LLC, to take over SRC's operations. Patterson picked up complaints, billing, meter reading, collections, maintenance, regulatory compliance, and the job of retaining a licensed operator for all eleven systems. PUC staff described SRC's maintenance failures as producing repeated interruptions that customers ultimately had to resolve themselves.
"Customers ultimately had to resolve themselves."
That sentence comes out of a regulatory filing. It also describes the meeting at Top Hand Cowboy Church.
As of September 2026, the commission's public docket shows no permanent transfer, acquisition, or consolidation. The temporary management order runs until the commission orders otherwise or a court takes superseding action. There is no end date and no documented plan for what follows. Patterson's appointment keeps the wells running, the bills going out, the chlorine residual where it needs to be. It doesn't settle who permanently owns these systems or who pays when the next pump goes.
Among systems serving fewer than a thousand people with persistent health-based violations from 2016 through 2018, the EPA found that fifty-seven percent were privately owned — often with limited rate bases, weak access to credit, and insufficient staffing.
Regulators know the pattern, and it stays unsolved for the households living inside it.
Fifty-one connections is usually too small to attract a buyer willing to put money into aging equipment, and too small to raise that money through rates without charging people more than they can pay. The Rolling Hills households have already shown what they do when the system fails: they organize, they pool what they have, they buy the pump. Whether Texas can build them anything more durable than a temporary manager is a question the record still hasn't answered, almost two years on.