City ‘making progress’ with water

By Katie Wilson
Times West Virginian

FAIRMONT March 04, 2007 09:51 pm

— The city’s water system is getting back on track after a series of problems over the weekend.
While the conserve-and-boil-water advisory is still in effect, the water system has recovered from problems occuring Friday and Saturday. According to a written statement, the city’s “finished water storage was at 35 percent early Sunday morning, higher than it has been for some time.”
Sunday afternoon, City Manager Bruce McDaniel said about 1 percent of the city’s water customers remained out of water and customers in the higher elevations may experience some low water pressure.
“We’re making progress,” McDaniel said.
While he stressed the situation is improving, McDaniel didn’t want to guess how much more time would pass before Fairmont’s water customers would be able to enjoy water directly out of their taps.
According to the statement, the water being produced is perfectly safe, but the boil-water advisory continues because of the potential of cross contamination because some customers are out of service.
Additional Fairmont water customers experienced outages and low pressure late Friday into Saturday after the system’s clear well drained unexpectedly Friday evening.
The situation seemed to have been corrected by late Saturday afternoon, but dealing with what turned out to be an isolated main-line break set workers back at least 24 hours in getting the system back on track after nearly a week of problems that include low storage levels in the city’s tanks.
McDaniel said utility officials had hoped to gain some water storage so workers could clean the filtration membranes at the water plant. Keeping up with line breaks and spontaneous well drainages kept that from happening, he said.
Officials are focused on getting this problem solved and making improvements at the plant so it won’t happen again, McDaniel said.
He noted additional filtration membrane units would be added incrementally to bring the plant’s capacity to 12.6 MGD (million gallons per day). At this time, the plant’s capacity is 10 MGD.
“That will give us time to clean them properly and buy us time to recover faster if this ever happens again,” McDaniel said.
City officials are working with the state board of public health and the state public service commission to find ways to prevent recurring problems, he said.
Utility workers have been working on the water problems since they began about a week ago. Friday, officials with General Electric-Zenon, manufacturer of the membrane filtration technology used in Fairmont, agreed with city officials that the Tygart’s water quality is a key problem that requires the system to be updated to filtrate it more effectively.
E-mail Katie Wilson at kwilson@timeswv.com.