Boil water advisory ends in Wichita. ‘Now the accountability work begins’

Wichita water customers can safely drink water from their taps again after more than 34 hours under a boil water advisory, city officials announced Thursday evening.

The Kansas Department of Health and Environment lifted the boil water advisory for the city of Wichita at 5:30 p.m. on Thursday evening, according to a news release from the agency.

“Laboratory testing of drinking water samples collected from the City of Wichita indicates no evidence of bacteriological contamination and all other conditions that placed the system at risk of contamination are deemed by KDHE officials to be resolved,” it says.

Minutes after KDHE gave the all clear, the city held a news conference announcing the change.

“Everyone is free as of this moment to use their tap water as they see fit for their daily lives and for their business purposes and business needs,” City Manager Dennis Marstall said.

A news release on the city’s website said that means “residents within the City of Wichita may now resume normal water use, including drinking, cooking, brushing teeth, preparing food and more.

“Although no contamination was found, Wichita water customers are encouraged to turn on the cold water tap at all faucets and run the water until they feel a change in temperature (i.e. the water gets noticeably colder). This will help remove air trapped in the pipes and clear out stagnant water,” the city release said.

Why was the advisory in place?

Wichita was under a boil water advisory starting Wednesday morning after the city’s water plant and pump station experienced a power outage, forcing some schools and businesses to close while others limited their offerings.

The city manually switched its electricity source from Evergy’s power grid to the plant’s backup generators. Around 5 a.m. Wednesday morning, the generators failed, and the city did not get the plant powered back up until 5:45 a.m., despite grid power being available throughout Wednesday morning.

The loss of power caused a loss of pressure in the water distribution system. That may “result in a loss of chlorine residuals and bacterial contamination,” the KDHE news release said.

Questions linger over the power failure, and elected city officials have vowed to take steps to make sure it never happens again.

“This morning I had my mayor’s briefing, and I said, ‘Goal number one is to get us back to safe drinking water as soon as possible,’” Mayor Lily Wu said. “I’m glad that the results came back, and now KDHE has rescinded that boil water advisory. I also shared with you that goal number two is to find out what happened, so this will not happen again. And so we want to make sure that we will continue that effort for goal number two moving forward.”

Vice Mayor Dalton Glasscock had a more blunt message on his Facebook page:

“I’m grateful our water remained safe,” he wrote. “Now the accountability work begins: understanding exactly what failed, why multiple safeguards failed, how communication broke down, and what changes will be made to prevent this from happening again.”

He also voiced frustration that he found out at the same time as everyone else.

“I learned the advisory had been rescinded through the media before receiving an update from the City,” Glasscock wrote. “That raises additional questions about how information is being communicated to the elected officials responsible for oversight.”

Director of Public Works and Utilities Gary Janzen said he’s committed to investigating what went wrong, and he plans to share information with the council on Tuesday.

But he also defended the city’s choice to preemptively operate the city’s sole water plant and only high-pressure pump station on backup power ahead of a storm, rather than waiting for the grid power to go out and generators to automatically kick on.

“What we’ve done over the course of time is, if we see storms coming, we will switch to backup power before the storm can cause issues with the power,” Janzen said. “It’s a lot harder on the equipment if the normal power goes out, and it automatically switches to generation. We have to test and reset all our equipment. It’s harder on the equipment.”

Janzen said the city tests the generators at least once a month, so it uses storms as an opportunity to do so.

“We know we need to test them, so we take the opportunity, often when there’s storms coming, then we’ll go to back up power anyway,” Janzen said. “It has worked. It will continue to work. We will continue that practice. It makes sense. Not sure what happened here.”

“The best information we have so far is our operators noticed a loss of power somewhere around 5 a.m., were able to bring power back up for an intermittent period of time and lost it again.

“So over the course of between 5 a.m. and 5:45 a.m. trying to diagnose the problem, we were able to get back to normal power, be able to get the system back up and running. That is all the information we have at this time.”

That’s a slightly different version of events than the city described Wednesday evening, when they said the city manually switched to generator power because there was “a blip” in Evergy power during the Tuesday evening storm. Janzen said the city is still working through the details to find out exactly what happened.

“Whether there was a blip or not, we’ve done this often,” Janzen said. “When a storm is coming, we’ll switch over to generation power long before the storm even starts to impact the community because we want to be ahead of it because there’s value and there’s advantage in us switching over to backup generation before we lose power of our plant. So the timing here, I don’t know that it really makes a big difference. This is what we were planning to do, regardless.”

Some suburbs still under advisory

Several Wichita suburbs will remain under the advisory until at least Friday evening.

That’s because Wichita’s wholesale customers have to wait to test their water until Wichita’s tests are finished, meaning once Wichita’s testing process ends, the suburbs’ will be just beginning. Once samples are collected, they must incubate for 24 hours before the Kansas Department of Health and Environment can conduct the needed testing.

These surrounding communities will continue to have the advisory in place: Bel Aire, Benton, Derby, Kechi, Park City, Rose Hill and Valley Center along with Sedgwick County rural water districts 1, 2 and 3 and McConnell Air Force Base.

This story was originally published September 17, 2026 at 5:40 PM.