Missoula, Montana Water Outage Today

Missoula water system at a glance

The system behind most taps in Missoula is Missoula Water, which EPA records list as serving roughly 68,200 people.

Where Missoula's tap water comes from

Water in Missoula comes out of the ground. Missoula Water runs 36 active wells that lift it to the surface for treatment and distribution. After treatment the water is held in 21 storage tanks and reservoirs and pushed uphill by 21 pump facilities; that storage is the buffer that keeps taps running for a few hours after a pump or main fails.

The outage angle. Wells mean there is no big plant to fail, but each one needs power to lift water. A grid outage can drop several at once, and recovery depends on how many have standby generators. Missoula Water can say which zones are covered.

Why the water goes out in Missoula

Which failures hit Missoula hardest follows from its weather, its housing stock and how it is supplied.

• Freezing weather. Missoula sees about 203 days a year with a low at or below 32°F, and 95 days at or below 20°F. The coldest morning in the 2015 through 2025 record came on December 22, 2022. The longest stretch with highs that never rose above freezing ran 51 days, ending January 17, 2017. Frozen service lines and meters cause single-address outages, while ground frost and thaw cycles crack older mains and produce the street-wide breaks.
• Flooding and heavy rain. NOAA logged 22 flood, flash flood and heavy rain reports in Missoula County from 2015 through 2026. Floodwater can undercut pipe crossings, swamp pump stations and overload treatment plants, and a notice to boil water often follows when it enters the system.
• Digging and utility work. Street projects, fiber installation and excavation near buried pipe regularly cut mains in Missoula with no warning, usually on a day with perfectly ordinary weather.
• Scheduled work, or a fault inside your own home. Utilities warn customers before a planned shutoff. If nothing was announced and the neighbors are fine, the cause is probably your shutoff valve, meter or pressure regulator.

Freeze, heat and rain: the Missoula weather record

Main break season in Missoula runs from late fall into early spring, with the coldest stretch around December through February.

The figures are reanalysis estimates for the center of Missoula, not readings from a single weather station, so treat them as a guide to how often each kind of weather occurs rather than as official records.

Boil water advisories and the federal violation record for Missoula

EPA lists no health-based violations for Missoula Water since 2015. It also lists 25 monitoring or reporting entries that are about paperwork rather than water quality, such as a missed sample or a late report.

Most recent entries, all monitoring or reporting:

• April 2017: A missed or late monitoring or reporting requirement (chemical and radiological contaminants) It is marked resolved.
• April 2017: A missed or late monitoring or reporting requirement (chemical and radiological contaminants) It is marked resolved.

A boil water notice in Missoula is a separate thing from a violation. Missoula Water issues one when pressure falls low enough for contamination to enter the pipes, after a main break is repaired, or when a routine test comes back positive. The Montana Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) oversees the process, and the notice stays until clean samples come back, usually a day or two after pressure returns.

What the lead tests and housing age say about Missoula

The most recent 90th-percentile lead result filed for Missoula Water is 1 ppb (2026). The federal action level is 15 ppb, so that result is well under it.

The age of the housing matters more than the utility's test average: 34.5% of occupied homes in Missoula predate 1970 and 1986 was the year lead pipe and solder were banned. Flush the cold tap after an outage and ask Missoula Water whether your service line is on its lead inventory.

When will the water come back on in Missoula?

Most repairs of an ordinary main break in Missoula take half a day once the crew is on site. Bigger mains, deep bury and busy roads stretch that to a day or more.

For a break that affects many customers, Missoula Water usually posts an estimated restoration time. When you call, ask the dispatcher what the crew has told them.

Preparing for a long water outage in Missoula

With about 2.2 people in the typical Missoula home, FEMA's one-gallon-per-person-per-day rule means 7 gallons covers three days and 31 gallons covers two weeks.

• 4.1% of homes are mobile or manufactured homes, whose pipes are more exposed to freezing and have less room for a water heater tank as backup.
• 53% of households rent. Tell your landlord or property manager about a leak or outage right away, since the shutoff valve may be theirs.
• A standard water heater is a ready-made 40-gallon reserve. Shut off its power or gas, open a hot tap somewhere in the house, and draw from the drain valve.
• Fill a tub or large containers early for toilets, cleaning and handwashing, and store drinking water separately in clean bottles.

Missoula versus neighboring water utilities

Water outage pages for nearby cities

Great Falls, MT · Spokane Valley, WA · Bozeman, MT · Spokane, WA