Why Has Shreveport’s Water Been Tasting Like Dirt?

There have been several posts online in the past few weeks about the quality of Shreveport's water.  Different neighborhood association websites on Facebook have had posts from people asking why their fountain drinks at local restaurants have been tasting really bad.

On Thursday, KEEL News reached out to William Daniel, the Director of Water & Sewerage for the City of Shreveport.  When asked about the condition of our water, and if these complaints were valid, Daniel told KEEL News:

Yes, we have heard those complaints, and to all those people who are complaining, they are one hundred percent correct. The water does not taste as good as it normally does.

What Happened?

When asked what's wrong?  Daniel replied:

We are in the midst of a very large project at the water plant.  We are switching over to how we make the water taste fresher and better through this project.   Unfortunately, in the post pandemic supply chain issues, we've had some delays. One of the filtering treatments that we use to make to water taste better currently, we've had to abandon for probably the last three weeks.  We are going to be online with the new treatment process probably the second week of July.

But in the meantime, we have managed to get our old filtering system back in place. That's going to start up probably again today.  But for the last couple of weeks, we have not been able to filter the water for taste.  The water quality is perfectly safe. But definitely there has been an issue with taste, and we will have that, hopefully, resolved by the end of today.

When Will the New System be Ready?

The city will reactivate the previous filtering system today, but when asked about the new system, Daniel was very encouraging about how Shreveport's water will taste with the new system.

I don't think the water tasted bad with our old carbon filtering process... this is going to be way better than that. We're hoping that the new process will be online by the middle of July.