Water supply disappears when opening city, comes back by itself

[jjcarroll 0]

Hey guys, I'm having a bug with my oldest city all of a sudden. I went into one of my peripheral industrial cities and noticed that its neighbour deal for water with my old main city was gone. I exited the industrial city (without saving) and went to the main city. The three pumps I have there supplying water to my region appear to be working normally, near 100% capacity, yada yada. I have never fiddled with water utility funding so it's not a maintenance problem (I double checked the funding). There is a blue watered area around the pumps themselves. Yet, the whole rest of the city is red (unwatered). The pipe connections look fine and I've put in extra pipes around the pumps to make sure there isn't some weird reason they weren't connected. The first time I noticed this problem, I exited the city without saving and went back in, but every time I go in there is the same problem. I have tried replacing and moving the pumps but it doesn't do anything.

Oddly, the only thing that works is to let the game run on fast mode and the water supply magically reappears after some months. After trying it a few times, I have found that the water comes back after a set number of months regardless of game speed. I'd be content to just let the water come back and get on with my life except that during those months all of the high-tech industry, other nice jobs, and over half the city's population get up and leave due to lack of water! They don't all come back after it comes back on even when I set taxes to zero for a while. That is definitely not acceptable.

Some further info is that it looks to me like the water disappears starting from when the city is opened and not before, since the city is doing fine the moment I open it and the "no water" symbols and drop in jobs and population only appear after letting the city run. Also, looking at the water graph the usage seems to jump up during the period the water is off for some reason, but the capacity is unaffected and stays at the normal level throughout.

I'm running SimCity 4 Deluxe on a 2010 MacBook Pro and I have it patched. The only addons I use are the really popular transit addon that makes it all work better (can't remember the name at the moment) and one that makes the ocean look different.

Thanks for any help you can give me!

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Truly a strange occurance. Are any of your water pumps in an area that could be affected by pollution? It is possible that the game is being confused by such a situation, but eventually clears itself up.

Do you have a water purification plant? If you can afford it, try dropping one in.

If you are selling water to other cities, I could suggest you replace the pumps by the Artesian Water plant.

[CaptCity 4,666]

Gosh, I want to say I once had the same problem, but it was long ago, and I may not be remembering correctly. I'm thinking it had something to do with a neighbor connection.

I seem to remember doing something along the lines of this (and you'll want to make a backup of the cities involved - just in case):

1. 
   
   
2. Added/Replaced all water sources - let the game run, save, restart.
   
3. Removed/Replaced all neighbor connection - let the game run, save, restart.
   
4. Removed all neighbor connections - let game run, save, restart, reconnect neighbors.
   
5. Removed all neighbor connections, gave each city its own source - let game run, save, restart, then remove new items and reconnect in original setup.
   

Again, I don't remember exactly what, but somewhere in the process (and it may have been some combination of the above), the game started working.

By the way, I wanted to ask if you're using just the game's default water pumps.