I am well aware that this is quite rare, but how do you normally imply there is no water available either due to some internal piping issues in a bulding or because the whole municipal water system is down?
a. The water is cut off.
b. The water is out. (As we say: "the electricity / power is out.")
PS. I know that we can say: "someone has turned / switched off the water," but here, the lack of water is not due to a deliberate action; but it has happened due to some urban / internal problems.
To me (southern United States), "out" would be a loss of water service for any reason, while "cut off" means it's specifically been turned off at the service valve for one particular dwelling, almost always for non-payment of the water bill.
In the contexts you specify, I'd say the water is out, but not cut off.
The water is cut off.
For me, that sentence suggests a deliberate action.
Living in the UK, this is such a rare event that I would probably feel the need to be explicit, e.g.
"There's no water coming out of the taps."
If this became a regular occurrence then I would say, "The water's off again."
I like this question. Annoyingly, it's happened to us a few times recently. I naturally said:
And I think that if the cold water had also been absent, i.e. no water at all, I would have just said:
For some reason, cut off doesn't sound right to me, perhaps because I associate it with power/energy only.
As a young teen, I remember very distinctly the grating tone of my neighbor's voice, yelling to her kids, "County done cut the water again! Get yer flip flops, we're goin down to the truck stop!"
Source: A search for "how to flush the toilet when" and looking at the language used in the results. It seems like "off" is the most common, but there are some variations:
I would say not working if it's broken. If someone asked for a drink: "Sorry, our water isn't working."
In some cases I might say broken, but you risk having a haha moment because "broken water" is a stage of childbirth. But I might say, "The ---- water is broken again!" to the landlord. I'm also more likely to use this for hot water specifically, "Don't take a shower, our hot water is broken." If you want to be fancy then you can specify what's broken--the pipe or the hot water heater or whatever.
Off has an implication that it was turned off deliberately. Usually a broken pipe will also result in the water being turned off but the water could be turned off for other reasons, too (like if the pipes are being upgraded). If I used this, I would probably be more specific: "Our water is off while the city repairs the pipes."
Cut off means that someone else turned it off outside your control. This has a slight implication that it was turned off for non-payment unless there's some other context explaining why it was cut off.
Out sounds like British English to my (American) ears. I would probably understand it, but I probably wouldn't naturally say it that way.
"This is a situation that we certainly can't just arbitrarily go in and shut off the water supply for a town." See, Fellhauer v. People, 447 P2d 986 (Colo. 1968)
But "shut down" a well, even though it is water-providing. (ibid.)
