A Vermont town went without drinking water for ten days. Some blame the private water company.

“Did you ever think one could find joy in flushing a toilet!” Woodstock resident Peggy Fraser wrote in a post to the community’s email listserv.

But things aren’t back to normal yet — the company that runs the town’s water system, the Woodstock Aqueduct Company, is still asking the nearly 1,000 residences on its system to conserve water, without enough water to fill its tank.

Some residents blame the company for not doing more to maintain its system and prepare for this kind of storm, after similar damage following Hurricane Irene.

And the outage has some residents talking about what steps the town should take and whether the town should take over the water system. Only one to two dozen of the state’s 409 community water systems are privately owned like Woodstock’s, according to Montross.

“Personally I view water as a public utility and it should be in the hands of the local government not private ownership,” Fraser said in her post. “We need to feel secure in management, viability and accountability.”

Tess Malloy, a spokesperson for the Woodstock Aqueduct Company, said work is underway to prevent this from ever happening again by burying one pipe even deeper under the river and connecting another pipe over the Elm Street Bridge.

The Vesper Inn, owned by Dana Hale, was one of the businesses that had to close.

“It shut us down for a week and a half,” she said. The town was asked to conserve water, and Hale said she couldn’t have guests under those conditions, which would also make doing laundry impossible. She saw shutting down as the right thing to do. “It wasn’t really a question,” she said.

But even now that water is back on, she said business has not bounced back yet: Many people with reservations are asking to cancel, due to concerns about the impact of flooding.

“You want to be understanding, but you’re looking down the barrel of 40, 50, 60 reservations being canceled,” she said.

Hale said some people wanted to cancel because restaurants in town were closed. The Village Butcher was one of them.

“If we don’t have clean water that’s safe to wash dishes and cook with, that creates a problem for anybody in food service,” said Alex Beram, who owns the butchery, deli and marketplace.

“Almost all restaurants and food service places had to close down,” he said.

He told the Globe he had to close his business for nearly 10 days while waiting for the water system to be repaired.

Jason Merrill was another business owner who had to close Worthy Kitchen, a restaurant in Woodstock, and Worthy Burger, in South Royalton. He said he closed the business in Woodstock for a week and a half.

“Obviously it’s a hit in sales in one of the busiest months of the year,” he said. “We lost 30 percent of those nights for the busy month.”

Merrill said a boil water notice was also issued for South Royalton, causing him to close the restaurant there. He was able to reopen last week.

Across the state, 18 Vermont water systems had to issue a boil water notice because of damage from the flooding, according to Ben Montross, program manager of the drinking water program at Vermont Agency of Natural Resources. Of those, Montross said, only two towns had to issue a do not drink notice: Woodstock and Morrisville.

In Woodstock, there are two places where water pipes run underneath the Ottauqueuchee River. After those broke, water started gushing out of the system.

“It was literally spewing 500 gallons of water a minute,” said Malloy, the company spokesperson. “So when there’s a large break like that, the whole system is depressurized basically immediately.”

That can lead to problems with water quality and water flow. To plug the leak, the Woodstock Aqueduct Company used firehoses to create a new connection, stringing them from a fire hydrant on each side of the river.

“You’re thinking about how to restore water so people can at least flush their toilets,” said Malloy. The fire hoses were connected on July 12. But by the 14th, the state told the company they needed to issue a do not drink notice because water from a fire hose could introduce the toxic chemical PFAS into drinking water. Exposure to the so-called forever chemical can be harmful to human health.

Malloy said that policy was new, since the company had used hoses to solve a similar issue after the system broke during Hurricane Irene.

Laura Powell is a member of the town’s planning commission. She said the company has not maintained its water system properly, pointing to a 2022 report by the state of Vermont that found two inadequacies with the water system.

The first problem was a “significant inadequacy” that had to do with fire hydrants on the system: using them could adversely affect the rest of the system, according to the state’s letter from June 2022. The state found a second issue it deemed minor: the water system wasn’t adequately testing drinking water quality.

The state gave the Woodstock Aqueduct Company deadlines of July and August 2022 to take steps to resolve these problems.

“Both of those items are still outstanding on our end,” Montross said.

The water company spokesperson, Malloy, said she was not familiar with those problems. When she was asked if the company has taken steps to resolve them, she said, “I don’t know anything about either of these, to be honest.”

Malloy said she was brought on to work on taking an inventory of pipes containing lead, and because she was already in touch with residents, the company asked her to handle communications during the water crisis.

“We’re working on it,” said Jireh Billings, who is listed as the state’s primary contact for the company.

The Woodstock Aqueduct Company started providing water to Woodstock in 1887. Many of the original stockholders belonged to the influential Billings family. The town’s “movers and shakers said we have an opportunity to create a business and away they went,” said Matthew Powers, executive director of the Woodstock History Center.

And Powers said that according to a 2021 paper, the Billings family still holds 52 percent of the company’s stock. Powers said very few private aqueduct companies are still around today.

Some residents have pointed out that depending on a private company comes with its limitations — only municipally-operated water systems are eligible for certain federal relief money.

“Unfortunately, the only disaster relief funds available (after Hurricane Irene) to the privately owned Woodstock Aqueduct Company were in the form of SBA loans, not FEMA grants, which would increase debt, decrease profits, and ultimately increase rates for the customers,” Robert Pear of Woodstock said in a community posting.

He said the town should try to buy the company. “It is a vital resource that needs to be protected,” he said.

That’s a solution Billings told the Globe his family has sought since the beginning. “I’ll leave that with my great grandfather when he was involved with several other men and tried to get the town to take it over,” he said. “My family has always believed the town should be in charge of their own water.”

Amanda Gokee can be reached at amanda.gokee@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @amanda_gokee.