It sounds like they had a brief service disruption and the underlying issue is already fixed. They just need to give the system time to flush out any questionable water. It's by no means ideal and seems like they should have had better backups (gravity, generator power) but doesn't seem to be a massive indictment of the system.
Hopefully, but let's not forget about the power crisis that Texas had semi recently which may continue to give Texas a bad name in regards to infrastructure for a long time to come. I doubt that the residents affected forget that quickly.
That because media coverage is generally anti-bitcoin mining. What many don't understand is that bitcoin mining at industrial scale incentivizes energy production, because the miners seek out cheap, otherwise underutilized energy (otherwise they aren't profitable).
During last July's heatwave, Texas's industrial bitcoin mining base "allow[ed] for over 1% of total grid capacity to be pushed back onto the grid for retail and commercial use.” [1] No other industrial-scale use of electricity can be turned off and back on when the grid needs excess capacity without harming that industrial production---you can't shut off a steel mill without enormous damage to production, or turn off a hospital without loss of life; but energy grid operators can sign contacts with bitcoin miners to have the right to dial them down to meet peak grid demand.
And yet, the NY Post article I sighted here spins the story anti-miners, missing the point: had the miner not been consuming power, the grid would have had 1% less to meet the peak heatwave demand. “There are over 1,000 megawatts worth of Bitcoin mining load that responded to ERCOTs conservation request by turning off their machines to conserve energy for the grid.”
Imagine if there were ten times as many miners there---they would have been able to provide 10% additional power to the grid during peak demand.
Connect the public water utility to a bitcoin mining operation, with contractual rights to dial down/turn off the bitcoin mining and use that electricity as backup should the water treatment plant's other source of electricity fails. When they don't need the backup power it provides security to the bitcoin network, and when they do need it, its there.
