KILLIAN — After yet another water outage left Killian residents dry over the Independence Day weekend, Magnolia Water explained what went wrong on the Fourth and how they plan to prevent it in the future.

"We had a booster pump that went out. We ended up having to rewire the control panel to get it running again. Our guys came out immediately when they received the call," Magnolia Water Director of Louisiana Regulatory Relations Steve Ernst said at a Monday night town council meeting. 

The town of Killian is usually a popular spot for Independence Day weekend because of its position on the Tickfaw River. However, this year, what was supposed to be a busy weekend will be remembered for the water outage.

"I have two houses in this area, neither one of them are on Magnolia and I've been here seven years and none of them have had a failure like Magnolia had on the Fourth of July," Killian resident Jamie Smith said," Killian resident Jamie Smith said. 

Magnolia said that only having one water well to service the town makes maintenance difficult and has led to boil advisories happening more often.

The water company hopes to relieve those struggles with a new grand storage tank, which it says will allow for a continuous source of water.

"With a ground storage tank, it'll basically turn into a second source, and we'll be able to provide water. While the wells are down, we'll be pumping it out of the ground storage tank," Ernst said. 

Another issue that was brought up by customers was the lack of communication.

"As far as customer service goes, people did call customer service and customer service told a lot of people it wouldn't be fixed until Monday so there's a lot of people that called customer service, they can't find them in the system, so then they're left going to Facebook, and we get 15-20 people going, 'No we've all called customer service,'" Smith said. 

Magnolia says it's working to improve communication for the future, including educating customers about what they're doing.

"The plan would be to talk about some of the challenges that we encountered when we first acquired the system. What we've done so far and what the long-term plan would be for kind of full compliance, full reliability, a couple of years down the road," Aaron Silas, with Magnolia Water's Customer Experience Department, said.  

They're also working on a water outage map to provide more up-to-date communication.

Magnolia asks customers to give it a year and a half, and they'll feel much better about the quality of the water system.

"Across our entire footprint over the state of Louisiana, Magnolia Water has seen a full kind of rehabilitation take generally about three years," Silas said. 

In the meantime, Magnolia is asking customers to sign up for their automatic communication program to stay up to date on any issues with the water system. 

Magnolia Water also said it will bring a couple of pallets of water and store them on site as a courtesy to residents if a water outage like the one on July 4 happens again.