Why Taps in Incheon Ran Rusty Water for Two Months

In 2019, when people in Incheon turned on their taps, murky, reddish-brown water poured out. It wasn't because a water treatment plant had malfunctioned or the river water had become dirty. It all started with a routine operation: temporarily shutting down one water treatment plant and rerouting water from another. The problem was that the water flowed in the opposite direction of normal. This dislodged decades' worth of sediment that had accumulated inside the water pipes. A staggering 260,000 households had to rely on bottled water for over two months, and apparently, the entire water system transfer procedure was changed afterward.