Recently, the Town of Chilhowie’s water system went out for a couple hours. Its thousands of users never knew.
In 2015, the water system was down for six months. Even then, its users had few problems.
The next year the headline “When the water stopped and no one knew” boldly declared a municipal preplanning success in a state local government magazine.
Chilhowie Town Manager John Clark contrasted those circumstances to those now facing the people in Jackson, Mississippi, where a water crisis is occurring.
Clark provided town council members with a CNN article that began, “It was only a matter of time before the water system in Jackson, Mississippi, failed, authorities said, and this week those concerns became a reality, leaving residents with no reliable running water in their homes and forcing schools and businesses to close.”
People are also reading…
Clark credits foresight and officials’ willingness to prepare for keeping Chilhowie from a similar fate.
In the 2015 article published by the Virginia Municipal League (VML), Clark said, “If we could not have gotten water from another source, thousands of people would have been on a boil water notice and under an imminent health threat.”
However, Chilhowie’s water system is interconnected with that of the Washington County Water Service Authority. That link has made all the difference multiple times.
The two entities operate the Mill Creek regional water treatment plant.
In 2015, significant rain and melting snow impacted the plant and almost all of its 120 filtering cartridges failed, but 10 months prior the WCSA had opened a new plant and grown its water capacity from 4.6 million gallons a day to 12 million, preparing for the failure of another plant.
When Mill Creek failed, Chilhowie and the WCSA switched to the new Middle Fork Plant.
“Thousands of people lost a water source and no one knew it,” said Clark to the VML’s Nancy Chafin. “The public was barely inconvenienced.”
While the switch was hardly noticeable to water users, it wasn’t easy on town staff.
Jay Keen, Chilhowie’s public works director, noted, crews worked 78 hours straight when Mill Creek went down.
In the years since, the Mill Creek plant has been renovated and upgraded with state-of-the-art systems.
Clark and other Chilhowie and WCSA officials reflected on those experiences as they discussed another infrastructure investment earlier this month.
Drew Langston, the WCSA’s production manager, told the Chillhowie council that Mill Creek has been operating 24/7 with two finished water pumps. Earlier this year, he said, staff began noticing problems with the pumps. Experts advised the WCSA “to act quickly,” Langston said.
The WCSA began procurement procedures to buy a third pump that could backup the other two. Once it’s in place, Langston said, work could begin to rebuild the other two pumps. However, he noted that the new pump isn’t expected to arrive until November or December and will take about six weeks to install.
In the meantime, Langston said that crews are doing all they can to keep the pumps operating. He did observe, “We’re at the mercy of the equipment.”
While the two operating pumps have likely been rebuilt since then, Clark noted that they were first installed in 1998.
The new pump’s cost is set at $212,000. Chilhowie would be responsible for $95,400, or 45%.
The town council unanimously OK’d paying for its share out of its federal pandemic relief funds.
Clark commended the leaders for their foresight.
He reflected, “Few people think about water until they turn on the faucet and it’s not there.”
