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Boil water advisories expand as hundreds of water mains break in Fort Worth

As of Thursday afternoon, there were about 400 confirmed and possible water main breaks in the city, and the west side of town fell under a boil water advisory.

FORT WORTH, Texas — Editor's note: The above video is from Thursday morning.

People picked up drinking water Thursday morning on the north side of Fort Worth, as they approached the 72nd hour of a boil water advisory. Some of them had no water in their homes at all.

At the same time, more water problems were popping up — possibly hundreds of them.

"The problem is, with all the main breaks, we are literally bleeding water from the system," said Fort Worth Water Department spokeswoman Mary Gugliuzza. "And we are just not able to maintain pressures."

Thursday morning, a large section of Fort Worth west of Montgomery Street was also put under a boil water advisory. Unlike the north side, where the issues stemmed from power outages earlier in the week, the west side is suffering from water main breaks. As of Thursday afternoon, there were at least 212 confirmed water main breaks, and reports of about 200 more the city still needed to investigate.

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Gugliuzza said frigid water is leading to breaks in the city's old cast iron lines. Temperatures hovered in the single digits for much of the week.

"This is going to go for several days," Gugliuzza said. "It takes several days of sunshine coming down to warm up the water."

Darrell Bartell in west Fort Worth doesn't have any water at all.

"I knew it was going to be bad," he said Thursday. "I didn't think it was going to be this bad."

He's now having to melt snow for water.

"I don't know where they're going to get the resources for this, the manpower for this," he said of the repairs.

Other communities are also suffering from water woes. North Richland Hills, Arlington, Saginaw and many others are under boil water advisories.

RELATED: Multiple cities in North Texas under a boil water order as power outages continue

And in Johnson County, Joshua resident Dave Stover hasn't had water since Monday.

"We started getting a trickle, and then it was gone after that," he said.

The Johnson County Special Utility District, which provides the water, posted on Facebook that people should expect to see a gradual increase in water pressure by February 24th. Thursday, the utility's finance manager told WFAA they were hoping to restore service by the weekend.

"We are doing everything we can to restore water as soon as possible," finance manager Joshua Howard said.

About 8,000 people are affected by the ongoing boil water advisory; the majority don’t have water, the utility added.

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In Fort Worth, water distribution sites were expanding as the need for water grew.

"This is unprecedented," said Gugliuzza, who added that it would now be Friday at the earliest before the north Fort Worth boil water advisory might be lifted.

They worry, however, that more neighborhoods could be affected in the coming days.

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