Water Plant News
What an unusual winter we have been having! I hope that you have been enjoying it as much as I have. The mild weather rainfall-wise has made it very easy for the water plant to continue making high quality water day after day with very little "adjusting" needing to be done. Call-outs (the operator being called out to deal with a problem outside of normal working hours) have been way down. This means a savings to the city, of course, as well as the operators being less cranky. What this low rainfall will mean this coming summer remains to be seen. Winter is not over yet! Hopefully Turner Creek (our sole source of water) will not be adversely affected. We did manage to locate and fix a fairly large leak in the transmission line between the water plant and the reservoir. Actually the leak was from an abandoned 2" water service. Nearby, another leak, this one a bad joint in the main, was also found and fixed. This has brought our water usage back down to a normal level for this time of year.       We are doing some testing of a new settling agent to possibly use in our treatment process. The compound is activated silica, and the testing is being done with the assistance of EES Consulting, which is providing the equipment, supplies, and expertise. We are hoping it will help with the problem of floc not settling in the sedimentation basin. We still experience this problem during times of mid-level turbidity in the raw water. Our goal is to extend the length of the filter run times.