 Four days after the town's only water supply vanished without warning, crews have been working to provide the city of Wheelwright with a limited, temporary solution. For decades, Wheelwright's sole source of water has been a flooded, abandoned mine above the city. For unknown reasons, that source went dry on Sunday, leaving the roughly 400 customers of the Wheelwright Municipal Water Service without water. They're reliant upon their old deep mine. It sounds like it's not very good. I think it's probably created a fish or something that's lost all its water. Judge Hill has been facilitating efforts between Wheelwright, Southern Water District, Knot County Water and state officials to come up with both immediate and long-term solutions. Yesterday, the city tapped onto a backup system with Southern Water. But because Wheelwright has always had a gravity-fed system, pipes remain dry for about half of the city's residents living in higher elevations. The City of Wheelwright never did do anything as far as thinking that they might be without water where they would have the pump situation where they could pump on up to their tanks. They're going to try to get another pump and see if they can't reverse flow and pump it back up into the higher elevations of Wheelwright. And when they get that in place, we'll see how that works. We're feeding them right now. I don't know, probably 100 gallons a minute or something like that. I mean everything is staying charged, but we need to get a more permanent solution for that in the future. Today, workers are installing a new pump station behind the post office to get water to those customers. However, even when that project is complete, residents will still need to conserve water because Southern is only able to provide a fraction of the flow necessary to fully restore service. The search for a permanent water source could see the city purchasing water from Knot County. And they can do right now 200 gallons a minute. And they're taking about 150, but we'll probably make some changes over on the Knot County side. I've been talking with Ron Johnson, their engineer, and probably changed some pumps out where it can be up to 400 gallons a minute where they can have a permanent source of water that's playing from Knot County going through our system as well as their own system coming up 122. However, Judge Hale cautions that even under the best of circumstances a permanent fix to the problem is expected to be months away. Reporting in Wheelwright, I'm Ralph Davis for EKB News.