Over 200 Drinking Water Systems Affected by Harvey Still Shut or Impaired

Volunteers help load Harvey victims cars with donated supplies outside in Port Arthur, Texas, on Sept. 2. (EMILY KASK/AFP/Getty Images)

More than 200 drinking water systems out of 2,238 affected by Tropical Storm Harvey are still shut or have notices for customers to boil water, state and federal regulators said on Saturday.

An additional 101 systems are still being contacted to “gather updated information of their status,” the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Texas Commission on Environmental Quality said in a joint statement.

Tropical Storm Harvey brought several feet of rain over a period of several days along Texas’s Gulf Coast, resulting in historic floods for the continental United States, hitting utilities like drinking water and sewage treatment.

Samaritans pray after helping clear furniture from the flooded house of a neighbor in the aftermath of Tropical Storm Harvey in Houston, Texas on Sept. 3, 2017. (REUTERS/Adrees Latif)

The EPA and TCEQ said Saturday that 161 drinking water systems have boil-water notices, and another 52 are shut down. Of the 1,219 wastewater treatment plants affected, 40 are inoperable in the affected counts. The regulators also said 15 dams have been damaged out of 340 in the affected areas.

As of the end of 2015, the latest data available, the state had 6,915 public drinking water systems.