Boil order gets explanation at Council session

Tuesday, October 13, 2015

An incident that made some residents' and visitors' blood boil got a closer look Tuesday night.

A boil order that lasted more than 50 hours for City of Greencastle water users and rural water customers last month was addressed briefly at the first City Council meeting since the inconvenient incident.

Councilman Mark Hammer raised the issue during Mayor Sue Murray's monthly report to the Council and the audience at City Hall.

Hammer asked if the situation had been anticipated.

"If it was anticipated," Mayor Murray assured, "it was not by anybody in the Water Department."

The boil order went into effect shortly after noon on Friday, Sept. 17 and was not lifted until just after 3 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 19, unfortunately coinciding with almost the entirety of a busy Family Weekend at DePauw University.

What ultimately resulted in the boil order being issued was work on a pair of chlorine feeds into the system that had begun on Wednesday, Sept. 15, the mayor explained.

The company installing those chlorine feeds at the water plant had the regular feed working that day and came back on Thursday to switch to the auxiliary feed to test it for effectiveness, subsequently finding a problem with the vacuum portion of the system.

Unfortunately, the feeds were not switched back when workmen departed for the day, and the one with the vacuum issue was left on. As a result, the amount of chlorine in the city water system had dipped by Friday morning, the mayor explained.

City officials contacted the Indiana Department of Environmental Management (IDEM), which instructed them to issue a boil order for any consumable water use.

"Was that anticipated? No," Mayor Murray assured Hammer.

That situation sent city officials scrambling as they attempted to contact as many of the major affected water users as possible directly. Meanwhile, an automated call was made to city customers, although the initial call was undermined by a faulty speaker that mostly muffled its message.

So as things seemed to go from bad to worse as all that unfolded, IDEM officials told the city it had to wait for two negative bacteria tests to be documented, and it would be 18 hours before the first test could occur.

Although that first test came back "absolutely fine," Mayor Murray noted, the city had to wait for a second test to clear or risk starting the clock all over again on the boil order.

"It wasn't a fun afternoon," Mayor Murray conceded of the Friday the boil order began. "It was a terrible inconvenience on a very busy weekend."

Council President Adam Cohen suggested that perhaps a silver lining in the boil order's dark cloud was how local merchants reacted to the run on cases of water after the boil order was issued.

None of the stores Cohen visited took advantage of the situation and gouged the public by raising prices to correspond with demand, he said.

Some stores even had water on sale at the time and kept that sale price in place despite increased demand, the councilman added.

Cohen also urged residents to make sure their phones are activated to receive reverse 911 messaging.

Respond to this story

Posting a comment requires free registration: