When Dan Zelikman turns his faucet on, he doesn’t know what’s running through it.
“It’s exhausting,” he said. “You go to sleep thinking about it, you wake up thinking about it.”
Zelikman is among the homeowners in Boiceville under do not drink or use to cook notices for their water. About 30 households are affected by an outage entering its fourth week. This is nothing new.
“We lost two Christmases over it,” Zelikman said. “Everyone had plans, everyone had to cancel those plans because we didn’t have water access. And now it looks like Thanksgiving will be another year without water.”
Zelikman says they haven’t been getting any answers from their provider, the Hudson Valley Water Company.
“We haven’t heard from them in 26 days,” he said. “They refuse to respond to questions as basic as what’s happening, how long will it take to repair and when will we get our water back?”
Ulster County Executive Jen Metzger has also been searching for answers as she says she’s frustrated with the lack of updates for the residents and county.
It’s led her to write the state Department of Public Services, which still has the proceeding around the company’s 2023 long-term water outage, open. Metzger’s letter addressed, in part, how these issues show a pattern. She says the department needs to intervene.
“They’re not updating their email lists, apparently regularly,” Metzger said. “From what has been reported to me, some people did not get paper notices. There have been people drinking water when there has been a do not drink order in place now.”
A spokesperson for the Department of Public Services said, “Water companies have a duty to provide safe drinking water to their customers and they are obligated to provide customers with factual information about their service whenever there are issues, including compliance with applicable State and Ulster County Department of Health requirements to notify customers of water quality issues. We will hold the company accountable for any violations of our regulations.”
Metzger would like to see actionable accountability as soon as possible.
“We’ve got to get the Public Service Commission really looking at long-term sustainable solutions,” she said. “But Hudson Valley Water Company is not the long-term sustainable solution.
Zelikman said he’s using bottled water for cooking, drinking, even brushing his teeth. But his family of four still has to shower, and he worries about the water that his kids have to use while he waits for this outage to end.
“It’s scary. I have a 1-year-old and I’m putting them in this water,” he said. “I’m trying to minimize it, but I don’t know what’s in it. I know that it could have a high arsenic count. And now every little blemish, every kind of mark on their skin makes me wonder, ‘am I being an irresponsible parent?’ But what are my options? I don’t have another home. I don’t have another place that I can move a family of four with a dog.”
Hudson Valley Water Company did not immediately respond to Spectrum News 1 for a request for comment. Metzger says she also has not heard back.