DAYTON — All residents who use the city of Dayton’s water service need to boil their water before cooking or drinking with it until officials can find out what the problem is with the system, city Water Director Michael Powell said Wednesday night at City Hall.
“We are experiencing varying levels of pressure and also outages system wide,” Powell said.
“The city of Dayton and Montgomery County’s water departments are working very feverishly to identify the problem and isolate it and we ask that the citizens continue to conserve water and observe the precautionary boil advisory.” Powell said additional crews have been called in.
“We’re still evaluating the problem,” city spokeswoman Toni Bankston said.
“We’re asking everyone to not use their water until we can evaluate the system,” she said.
Dayton Fire Department District Chief Adam Landis said, “We have crews and equipment in place.
We have equipment on the apparatus.
“We are prepared for this type of contingency that the crews are ready for and we’ve talked to the surrounding departments and we are ready to go,” he said.
“We have equipment in place and manpower in place and we are prepared for this type of emergency,” Landis said.
“We have some additional equipment in place and apparatus to make sure we have adequate water supply.” We will update this developing report as we learn more.

The agreement, called a consent decree, forced the city’s Watershed Management Department for the better part of two decades to heavily invest in upgrading the city sewers, possibly at the expense of maintaining the water supply system, the audit found.
“Focus on consent decree projects may have resulted in under-investment in drinking water infrastructure,” the city’s audit found.
Infrastructure needs At a Atlanta City Council utilities committee meeting last week, the city’s watershed commissioner, Kishia Powell, described the struggles her agency has had trying to get a handle on the water loss problem.
“We have been trying to improve our accounting for water loss,” Powell said.
An under-investment Today, the Watershed Management Department is in charge of both the city’s sewer system and the drinking water system.
Since 2003, the city has spent nearly $ 2 billion to comply with terms of a consent decree which required repair to its sewer system and that may have have led to neglect of the drinking water system, the city audit last found.
“Focus on consent decree projects may have resulted in under-investment in drinking water infrastructure,” the city’s audit found.
‘Salaries a bit all over the place’ At the council committee meeting last week, Powell not only faced questions about the outage from elected leaders who oversee her department, but also criticism from current and former city employees.
Powell declined to address allegations of patronage within her department, but she said she was meeting with employees to hear them out, including some of the employees at committee.
“We are trying to work through them to get to a better place.