St. Helena city staff are working out a strategy to clear up the discolored or brown water that sometimes spurts out of city pipes, a persistent, decades-long problem staff have largely attributed to built-up iron and manganese minerals in the water distribution system.
“We’re clearly not where we want to be,” Joe Leach, the city’s public works director, said at the City Council’s meeting Tuesday, Sept. 8.
St. Helena’s next step to address the water discoloration issue is expected to involve another stage of investigation — by adding a camera system to the water pipes to look for sediment and corrosion, advancing water-quality sampling and more — so the city can narrow in on underlying causes and then carry out a cleanup strategy.
Leach said at the meeting staff expect to bring contracts to the council for the camera system later this month. Staff overall would like to approach the issue methodically, he said, with the opportunity to change direction if efforts to clear up the water don’t work out. That approach will ultimately involve pursuing mitigation of known issues alongside continuing monitoring and investigation of underlying causes, he said.
“If an intervention isn’t producing durable improvement, then we change it, then we pivot and we kind of attack it from a different angle,” Leach said.
Leach added that the city knows brown water issues are typically seasonal, with most incidents occurring June through September.
The water discoloration issues are also usually found in a few neighborhoods, but they can impact areas throughout the water system. That’s especially true after a major hydraulic event, such as the aftermath of a private tour bus colliding with a fire hydrant in July, which Leach said caused 4,500 gallons a minute of uncontrolled flow and resulted in ”an epidemic of brown water throughout the city.”
But he added that staff still need to isolate where the debris in the water comes from, to figure out what areas of the system need to be cleaned and how, overall, to address the water problem in a lasting way.
Issam Najm, an environmental engineer and vice president of New York City-based Hazin and Sawyer — a water consulting company working with the city to solve the water issue — said there’s been enough accumulation of minerals in the water system that the entire system likely needs a cleaning. But, he said, the cleaning needs to be approached systematically, in a way that doesn’t cause too much disruption to water customers or merely push debris around the system.
“It’s a difficult problem, and for residents it’s a terrible problem, because it’s not just about drinking,” Najm said at the meeting Tuesday. “It’s about laundry, it’s about washing, it’s about everything.”
But in the meantime, the council on Tuesday rejected a plan to give a $200 credit to all water customers intended to acknowledge impacts they may have faced from discolored water. Instead, council members said they were interested in creating a program to compensate people or businesses that have been impacted by the city’s water issues.
You can reach Staff Writer Edward Booth at 707-521-5281 or edward.booth@pressdemocrat.com