PARKSVILLE — Water service returned to a small group of Lily Pond Road homes in Parksville, which is in the Town of Liberty, Wednesday afternoon after residents spent six days without reliable access to water.

The restoration came four months after a 12-day outage left the same residents questioning who was responsible for maintaining their service and what was being done to prevent future disruptions.

Residents Nicholas Prague and Judy Freestone said water service stopped Friday, July 10, affecting approximately seven or eight homes connected to the Village of Liberty water system outside village boundaries.

Prague said he had received no water since the outage began and had been unable to get a clear explanation from the village water department.

“I get no response from the water office whatsoever,” Prague said. “They said they were going to talk to [Department of Public Works Water Department for the Village of Liberty] Dave Burke and get back to me, and I got nothing.”

Freestone said her home had also been completely without water, although some neighbors reported receiving a small trickle early in the morning.

“My neighbors have said they get a trickle once in a while in the morning, and then after 7 a.m. it seems to die,” she said.

Residents reported the outage to the Village of Liberty and Town of Liberty, Freestone said, but had not received a timetable for restoration before the water returned Wednesday afternoon.

Five days after the water stopped flowing, Freestone said a boil-water notice was delivered to her home.

“But we have no water to boil,” she said.

Neither resident reported receiving bottled water, a water tanker or any other emergency assistance during the outage, despite the summer heat.

“I can’t flush the toilet,” Freestone said. “We’re at our wits’ end, honestly.”

Although water service was restored Wednesday, residents said they had not been told what caused the outage or what was done to correct it.

The latest outage follows a series of prolonged disruptions affecting the same homes. Residents were without water for 12 days in March, following another outage lasting approximately two weeks last summer and several shorter interruptions.

During the March outage, Mayor Joan Stoddard attributed the loss of service to a pump failure. Town Supervisor Frank DeMayo said at the time that the properties were out-of-district users of the village system and that creating a separate water district for a small number of homes could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Residents say the underlying problem was never explained or resolved.

Freestone said water unexpectedly returned after the March outage without residents being told what had been repaired or what caused service to resume.

“We all woke up, and miraculously there was water,” she said. “But there was no explanation as to what they did or what happened. They never got back to us.”

Both residents said local officials attributed the latest loss of pressure to heavy summer water use by nearby religious communities.

Freestone questioned that explanation because the previous 12-day outage occurred in March, outside the summer camp season.

“The 12 days we were without it was March,” she said. “There were no camps open back then.”

Prague said the problem appears to involve the section of the system serving the small group of homes near the reservoir.

“It seems to me there’s a problem there that they’re simply not addressing,” he said.

Prague also disputed any suggestion that the homes were improperly connected to the village system. He said residents’ research indicates homes along the road have received water through the line for decades and were reconnected when the line was upgraded.

“We’re paying our water bills,” Prague said. “Our water bills actually went up. They’ve almost doubled, and we’re just not getting service or any consideration.”

Freestone said she had reliable water pressure after moving into her home in 2013 and did not begin experiencing recurring outages until the past few years.

“I have never had a problem, even in the summer,” she said. “I’ve always had perfect water pressure.”

She said residents have been left caught between different levels of government while continuing to pay property taxes and village water bills.

“What does that mean—forget the people in Parksville because we don’t want to spend the money?” Freestone said. “Meanwhile, they’re taking my tax dollars, and I also pay my water bill.”

Prague said residents are not asking for special treatment, but for the water service they have paid to receive.

“We’re not some sort of pirate community getting water off this line,” he said. “We’re paying our water bills.”

The Sullivan County Democrat reached out to the Village of Liberty Department of Public Works for information about the cause of the outage, what was done to restore service and whether any long-term repairs are planned, but did not receive a response by presstime.