Water service has been restored in Shady Cove after a nearly five-day outage that prompted the local fire station to hand out bottled water and supplies for flushing toilets — and city officials to declare a state of emergency.

Water service was returned to some 300 homes around 11 p.m. Thursday night, less than 12 hours after city officials declared a state of emergency.

The outage began early Monday, affecting hundreds of residents served by Hiland Water Corporation, a subsidiary of NW Natural and one of more than two dozen public water systems operated within the city.

Water service was disrupted due to a failure of a system pump and crews worked around the clock to make the repair, which involved waiting for special equipment to arrive on site.

County officials and representatives of NW Natural confirmed Friday morning that water had been restored to all Hiland customers. Delaney Payne, Jackson County assistant emergency manager, said county officials were relieved for residents and the county was “happy to assist the city by continuing to support their response and ensuring that residents of Shady Cove have safe, adequate drinking water through the remainder of this event.”

David Roy Sr., director of communications for NW Natural, said Friday morning that NW Water was relieved to have finalized the needed repairs.

Roy said a boil water advisory would remain in effect for now, with residents asked to only use water for indoor needs until further notice.

“We’ve got water services back to all of our customers. We’re very happy about that,” Roy said.

“We are asking — really, we’re strongly urging — customers to conserve water use and to limit their use to indoor uses because being able to get our holding tank back up to certain levels will allow us to do tests,” he said. “And a successful test is necessary to move past that boil water notice. … A boil advisory is certainly a serious thing but we are in much better shape than we were these past few days.”

Roy said bottled water would still be made available at Fire Station 4 along Highway 62 through “at least Friday.”

Hiland customers can expect to initially experience air in their water lines, and that they should leave their faucets open for the air to escape.

Mayor Jon Ball said the city was relieved that service had been restored. Ball expressed serious concern for the ongoing outage on Thursday with temperatures hitting triple-digits posing health and safety concerns.

In addition to county and city officials responding to the outage this week, following the emergency declaration, community volunteers and firefighters for the county’s District 4 fire station operated a water distribution site nearly as soon as the outage began.

City volunteers and firefighters distributed bottled drinking water and fire station personnel use their fire equipment to collect and set up a portable well of non-potable water for flushing toilets and other industrial uses.

Ball urged residents Friday to still come get the bottled water because the Hiland supply should be considered non-potable until testing is done.

By Thursday, after activation of the Jackson County Emergency Operations Center, a number of community organizations were mobilized via the Rogue Valley Community Organizations in Disaster.

RVCOAD facilitated community partnerships with the Jackson County Long Term Recovery Group (JCC LTRG), ACCESS, Rogue Food Unites, The Home Depot, Lowe’s and Walmart. The organizations provided everything from hand sanitizer and wet wipes to 5-gallon buckets for transporting of non-potable water.

Bell said he was grateful that residents would “not be without water through the upcoming long, hot weekend.”