JASPER — A boil order for Jasper and Ireland residents that began early Wednesday morning ended Sunday afternoon when two sets of water samples from the city’s plant passed state standards.
With the system back to normal, officials are beginning to evaluate how the situation was handled.
“We will definitely be looking at this whole situation,” a relieved Gas and Water Manager Ernie Hinkle said this morning. “We want to determine if anything could’ve been done differently. We will bring in engineers to look at this and consult us, to see if there are any other steps, any better steps we need to take.”
While some people in the public have been grumbling that the precautions — including the repeated stance by officials that water that came in contact with any surfaces used for food be boiled before being used — went overboard, officials said the response was appropriate.
“We have an obligation for overall public safety,” Mayor Terry Seitz said. “We issued the order because the levels of chlorine we measured were below our standards. As a public utility, we take safety precautions and standards seriously. That was the right thing to do. You err on the side of precaution.”
“The public safety comes first,” Hinkle concurred.
The water department also heard from residents that workers should have caught the problem earlier.
“That’s one of the biggest things we’ve heard during this. That simply is not true,” he said. “Our guys constantly test the water. The reason we’re testing is to see how much chemicals we must put into the water, with the biggest of those being chlorine.
“The tests were showing that we needed to add more chlorine, add more chlorine,” Hinkle said. “Then we were at the maximum chlorine that we could safely add. That was when the boil order was ordered, when we got to the point that the water we were drawing from the (Patoka River), we were no longer able to treat it to meet our standards.”
Officials believe the problem was caused by a major turnover of water in the Patoka River; they described the turnover as much more turbulent than normal. When the mud along the river bottom, which naturally includes manganese, moved closer to the surface, the higher-than-normal levels of manganese infiltrated the city’s water system and destroyed some of the chlorine injected into the water to eliminate bacteria. Officials described the motion of the river as leading to “major turbidity” that threw operations out of whack.
The Indiana Department of Environmental Management handled the investigation and drew that conclusion.
“It is their speculation that the major inversion is what caused this,” Hinkle said. “They can’t say for certain that was the cause, but that is their educated guess. We may never know for sure.”
State officials said that the probability of this happening again is very low, but couldn’t guarantee that it would not.
City officials are evaluating the matter and their response, Seitz said.
“We are looking at what happened, how it happened, how we responded to and what we can do differently in the future,” he said.
The water department is also resuming today its fall hydrant flushing.
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