Water shortage in Orlando

[becca101]

It looks like there is a water shortage in Orlando which might result in a boil your water order in the next week or so:

Orlando mayor asks residents to start conserving water immediately due to liquid oxygen shortage

Dyer explained that many COVID-19 patients require liquid oxygen for their treatment. OUC has used liquid oxygen to treat the water supply for years.

www.wesh.com

I am planning to go to WDW and stay at a Disney hotel in a couple of weeks so I was wondering if anyone has any experience with what Disney will do in this situation or any tips?

 

[Ayla]

It isn't a water shortage. It's a treated water shortage, due to all the Covid patients needing the liquid oxygen to stay alive.

Maybe it's just me, but I'd take that as a major sign (in addition to all the other huge red flags) that maybe now isn't the best time to visit WDW.

 

[peter11435]

It looks like there is a water shortage in Orlando which might result in a boil your water order in the next week or so:

Orlando mayor asks residents to start conserving water immediately due to liquid oxygen shortage

Dyer explained that many COVID-19 patients require liquid oxygen for their treatment. OUC has used liquid oxygen to treat the water supply for years.

www.wesh.com

I am planning to go to WDW and stay at a Disney hotel in a couple of weeks so I was wondering if anyone has any experience with what Disney will do in this situation or any tips?

WDW is not in the city of Orlando and does not use city water. WDW has its own water supply and water treatment plant and is unaffected by this shortage.

 

[donsullivan]

The misinformation flying around on this is kind of crazy. What they did in Orlando is ask everyone to turn off their irrigation systems ad stop doing things like pressure washing for a few weeks. The data I heard on Friday is that 40% of the water usage is for irrigation and removing that demand for a few weeks should be enough to get past this. If they are able to lower total demand enough we will not have an issue. if however, people do not pull back on usage (it’s not like it doesn’t rain nearly every day anyway) we may have an issue where they do not have enough LOX to treat the water which has the ’potential’ to trigger a boil water alert.

The report I saw on Friday suggested that it’s not about the capacity of manufacturing LOX, it’s an issue of transport capacity. To put it simply, they do not have enough truck capacity to deliver to meet the surging demand and are going to prioritize hospitals over water treatment.

There is no shortage of water, the shortage is liquid oxygen needed to treat it.

Some local communities (including RCID) may be less affected by this because they use ‘grey’ water for irrigation which does not need the treatment process that uses the LOX. But the LOX shortage is real and impacting every single water system in the region due to the massive surge in COVID cases. If things keep up, it could indeed impact RCID in the future unless they have some technique for water treatment that doesn’t use LOX that’s different from the rest of the local communities.