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ODESSA — An outage left tens of thousands of residents without running water on Saturday afternoon after crews could not isolate a leak that city leaders say began earlier in the week.

Water also stopped flowing for county residents outside the city limits, a majority of whom rely on Odessa's water plant as well, Mayor Javier Joven said.

The city shut off its entire water supply Saturday at 6:50 p.m. and issued a public notice roughly two hours later. By then, many people on social media said they went the day without running water. The city said it did not announce the outage earlier because some households still had water trickling out of the faucets, albeit on very low pressure.

The outage is the latest in a yearslong race to keep up with the 700 miles of rapidly aging and deteriorating water infrastructure in Odessa. At the center of the Permian Basin's oil patches and one of its fastest-growing cities, Odessa is struggling to adapt to an increasing demand for water and other city services. In 2022, a water line break left the city without water to drink, wash, or flush toilets amid a summer heatwave.

Although city leaders expect to restore water service by midnight, a boil-water notice issued early Saturday will remain in effect as long as 24 hours after crews bring the pumps back online.

Joven expects similar water line breaks in the coming months because of years of neglect. Odessa's utilities director last April warned that if the infrastructure was left unattended, the system could experience “catastrophic failures,” the Odessa American reported.

“More breaks are going to happen,” Joven said Saturday night.

City Manager John Beckmeyer said crews discovered a leaking valve on a main line on Tuesday but decided to wait before fixing the leak to avoid shutting down the water supply during the work week. At the time, officials told the public they believed the leak and the repair would be isolated. In the days that followed, water streamed down busy 42nd Street as maintenance crews attempted to release excess water pressure.

On Saturday, repair crews determined they would have to remove the valve and replace it, forcing them to shut off the water supply at the source.

City leaders said they will address the outage during the upcoming city council meeting on Tuesday, where they plan to confirm the amount of water the city and its residents lost — and how much it cost them.

The water line break caused disruptions throughout the county. Restaurants closed their doors due to the lack of water while others used their reserves. Residents flocked to supermarkets to purchase bottled water to make due.

“It's one of those things where we're always on high alert,” said Alejandro Barrientos, owner of Curb Side Bistro, a local restaurant. Barrientos said he and his staff had been monitoring the water pressure on Friday. When the city issued its first notice on Saturday, the restaurant's staff turned to its backup water reserves.

“You use that and pray you have enough to get through your shift,” he said.

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Liany Serrano Oviedo crouched in her yellow graduation dress, stared at the mirror and carefully blotted her tears with a wipe. It was a rare moment for the 22-year-old University of Texas at Austin senior to be alone and gather her composure.

Serrano Oviedo had been in high-performance mode all Thursday morning, making laps to get everything ready for the Latinx graduation ceremony she planned, sometimes breaking out into a jog to get from one side of the venue to another.

But she had a moment of frailty while talking with a donor who helped sponsor the event. All of her hard work in the last four years — getting her degree and organizing Thursday's ceremony — was for her Venezuelan parents, she said.

“This graduation is a big deal because a big chunk of it is bilingual,” Serrano Orviedo said. “And my mom's English isn't that great. And so this ceremony is one where I know 100% she's understanding everything that's being said.”

For decades, subsets of Texas college graduates — from Latinx to LGBTQ students — have organized intimate events separate from the larger commencement ceremony to celebrate the completion of their degrees in the context of their identities and cultural heritage.

But this is the first year UT-Austin and other Texas public universities cut funding and staff support for such ceremonies in response to Senate Bill 17, a new state law that bans diversity, equity and inclusion programs.

Students across the state like Serrano Oviedo fought tooth and nail to rescue cultural graduations, often taking on the burden of planning and finding funding for the ceremonies. The Latinx graduation ceremony took place days before UT-Austin's commencement, which will be held Saturday.

“It doesn't matter how many obstacles you're going to throw at our community,” said Serrano Oviedo. “We're still going to thrive and we're going to find other ways.”

Students take the lead

For years at UT-Austin, thousands of Latino family members would pack the on-campus Gregory Gymnasium at the end of the school year to see their graduates walk the stage. Some graduates used to wear serape soles made of traditional Mexican cloth. It was the only ceremony where the program was read in English and Spanish.

The now-defunct Multicultural Engagement Center would also pay for surprises for the families, like live Latin bands and food and floral decorations that matched the serapes.

But to comply with SB 17, public universities in Texas have shuttered the multicultural centers that used to organize cultural graduation ceremonies like the Latinx celebration.

Lawmakers who supported the passage of SB 17 last year argued that DEI programs and training were indoctrinating students with left-wing ideology and forced universities to make hires based on their support of diversity efforts rather than on merit and achievement.

The ban did not stop students in the graduating class of 2024 from organizing their own event. Serrano Oviedo and other seniors raised $9,000 with help from Latino leaders across the state. Austin City Council Member José “Chito” Vela secured a local performing arts center for the students to host the ceremony off campus. The League of United Latin American Citizens, the oldest Latino civil rights group in the U.S., stepped in to pay for that venue.

Students graduating this year have already been shaped by a unique set of global and political forces. Many of them graduated high school and entered college in the thick of the pandemic, which means they missed out on a formal ceremony back then. And now they're leaving at a time where pro-Palestinian protests have broken out across campus, including UT, leading to dozens of student arrests.

On Thursday, as UT-Austin history professor Emilio Zamora adjusted the satin hood for one student at the Latinx ceremony, he called the survival of the tradition “a declaration of independence” from public institutions.

“These students are demonstrating they will have the final say,” he said. “It is a demonstration of our resilience. The university has failed us, but we have risen to the occasion with our youth.”

A nod to family 

Under the pink and purple lighting of the nearly-full auditorium, parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles clapped, cheered and clapped again.

Cultural ceremonies often elevate themes that are important to those groups of students — like family to the Latinx community — and aren't always part of university-wide graduations.

“Gracias a mi mami y papi”— “Thank you to my mother and father” in Spanish — one students' graduation cap read. Another one read, “Sus sacrificios y apoyo son la razón por la cual lo logre”: “Your sacrifices and support are the reason I made it.”

For some students and faculty, celebrating the accomplishments of Latinx students is a critical recognition of the hard road they journeyed on to get their degree. Latino college students are often the first in their family to get a college degree. That makes cultural ceremonies, which acknowledge the generational sacrifices and obstacles that families have overcome, all the more significant.

They're also an important gesture if Texas universities want to continue to recruit, retain and graduate Latino students, supporters say.

Despite being designated a Hispanic-serving institution, UT-Austin's enrollment still lags behind in representing the state's makeup. Hispanic residents represent the biggest share of Texas' population — 40% — but only about 25% of students at UT-Austin are Hispanic.

“The cornerstone of a successful Texas is to be doing all of [these cultural events]. In essence, it's going to affect academics and how people of color perceive the state,” said Katherine Ospina, a UT senior who raised the funds to pay for the ceremony. “Texas is an extremely diverse state and we need to capitalize on that diversity.”

Domingo Garcia, the president of LULAC, the Latino civil rights group that covered the cost of the venue, said he worked two jobs to be the first in his family to graduate from college. Preserving cultural graduations in the face of the DEI ban sends a signal that Latino culture has a place in the state, Garcia said.

“People don't understand the sacrifices that parents, many of them working class, have made to have that son or daughter attend UT and what they've gone through to get to that place,” said Garcia, who is a former state representative. “To not be allowed to celebrate your culture, to celebrate who you're from and what your family's from, it's really immoral.”

Ospina said she could not let the class of 2024 be “lost in the ether” of a post-SB 17 reality.

On Thursday, as the last few family members filtered out of the venue with their graduates at the end of the ceremony, Serrano Oviedo balanced a stack of leftover orange cords and a plastic H-E-B bag.

Serrano Oviedo said she is trying to secure funding from the city of Austin for future ceremonies. A new round of students will have to step in to do the work of organizing, but she's hopeful the tradition will continue.

“Everything the state Legislature and university threw our way, we overcame,” Serrano Oviedo said.

Ikram Mohamed contributed to this report.

The Texas Tribune partners with Open Campus on higher education coverage.

Disclosure: H-E-B and University of Texas at Austin have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

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A University of Texas at Austin lecturer was arrested and fired this week in connection with his participation in a pro-Palestinian demonstration on campus, raising fresh concerns among faculty members and free speech advocates about academic protections in the state.

Richard Heyman, who has taught at UT for 18 years in the College of Liberal Arts, was arrested Wednesday by the Texas Department of Public Safety and charged with interfering with public duties, a Class B misdemeanor. The charge stems from Heyman's participation in an April 29 pro-Palestinian demonstration in which authorities arrested around 80 protesters who had set up an encampment on campus.

The university fired Heyman on Thursday through an email, according to his lawyer, Gerry Morris. Heyman was scheduled to teach three classes during the upcoming fall semester.

According to Heyman's arrest affidavit, DPS troopers accused him of yelling expletives at law enforcement during the protest, pulling away a trooper's bike and making a motion with a water bottle “as if he were going to swing it and hit” a trooper.

Citing three video recordings of Heyman's actions, Morris disagreed with the affidavit's characterization of his client as physically disruptive.

Morris said the officer initiated physical contact and pushed Heyman, which caused Heyman to grab onto the bike's handlebar for balance. Morris said he plans to ask the Travis County Attorney's office to dismiss the case.

“This is a politically charged atmosphere that this occurred in,” Morris said. “I think in a normal atmosphere, the prosecutor would look at this, drop it pretty quickly. But I'm not sure that it's going to move very quickly given what we're in the middle of.”

Heyman's firing comes amid rising concern among Texas faculty groups that state legislators have passed laws that have led to increased scrutiny and insecurity regarding their jobs. Anne Lewis, an executive board member of the Texas State Employees Union, linked Heyman's firing to what she said are broader moves by the state to restrict academic freedom and First Amendment rights.

“I think it is an attack on higher education and its core values, and Richard is just one of many that is getting caught up in this attack,” Lewis said. “He's the worst so far.”

Last year Texas lawmakers passed Senate Bill 17, which banned diversity, equity and inclusion offices at Texas universities, and Senate Bill 18, which set out to terminate tenure at state universities but ended up only requiring schools to provide clear guidelines for how to obtain and keep tenure. Complying with SB 17 resulted in firings at universities across the state, with UT-Austin laying off dozens of employees earlier this year.

The state Legislature's Higher Education Committee will likely monitor the implementation of both laws and consider regulating faculty senates in the next legislative session, according to Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick's agenda for lawmakers during the interim period before the next legislative session. Faculty senates represent faculty members in open meetings to make recommendations on a wide variety of topics such as undergraduate degree programs and student services.

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