Cities drink reservoir water again
The last vestiges of Marion County's water crisis should go away today as Marion joins Hillsboro in switching back to pumping water from Marion Reservoir.
"The parts we needed came in, we got permission from the state, and we should start pumping Wednesday," Marion City Administrator Dave Mayfield said Tuesday.
Hillsboro's waterworks resumed pumping reservoir water Friday, less than two hours after officials received eagerly awaited results of more than a week's worth of testing of algae-infested reservoir water processed using a new treatment procedure that both waterworks will implement.
The results, from a laboratory in Ohio, detected so little toxin remaining in water that it was impossible to assign a numerical figure to it, Hillsboro City Administrator Steve Garrett said.
This, coupled with the disappearance of toxic anabaena algae from the reservoir more than a week earlier, convinced Hillsboro officials that it was safe to end round-the-clock trucking of water from McPherson and a nearby rural water district.
Marion immediately adopted plans to implement a similar procedure at its plant and resume pumping reservoir water, but had to wait until a replacement part arrived. In the meantime it continued to draw water for its backup supply in Luta Creek.
Mayfield acknowledged receiving complaints about "hardness" of the water Marion drew from Luta Creek.
During Monday afternoon's Marion City Commission meeting, he said Luta Creek water was twice as hard as Marion Reservoir water.
The Kansas Department of Health and Environment told him "there's nothing you can do," Mayfield said. Now that the city is switching back to reservoir water, he said Tuesday, the problem should go away by week's end..
Hardness and minerals have nothing to do with the quality of the water for drinking, Mayfield emphasized.
"There'll be some spots on dishes and cars, but no harm to anyone or anything."
Parts for the water plant's activated carbon machine have arrived, Mayfield said. But now, city workers need to install a secondary output, another place to inject the carbon into the water, he said.
"We may be back to drawing our water from the reservoir by Wednesday," Mayfield said, "or next week at the latest."
Harvey Sanders, the city's superintendent of public utilities, said loaned items such as "bladders" — water containers — from other cities had been returned.
City Commissioner Larry McLain expressed thanks to "everyone for their help" — employees, the county, the state, and the Lincolnville and Hillsboro fire departments.
Close cooperation noted
Hillsboro's switch back to using reservoir water was the latest twist in an often confusing and rumor-filled story that, according to some, has been marked by differences between Hillsboro and Marion but, according to state officials, has revealed close cooperation among both cities and Peabody, which gets its water from Hillsboro.
"Both water plants have performed more than adequately throughout the situation," the state's chief water quality expert, Dave Waldo, said Friday.
Waldo, chief of the public water supply section of the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, stressed that never was public health jeopardized in any of the three towns.
"I would drink the water," he said. "That's never been in doubt."
Marion and Hillsboro legally could have continued to draw water from Marion Reservoir throughout the unusual toxic anabaena bloom, Waldo said.
"Anabaena has been on the EPA's contaminant candidate list for years, and they're doing a lot of research about it," he said. "But it's such an unusual thing there are no standards for how much is safe and how much isn't."
KDHE, which owns the water in the reservoir, reviewed scientific literature and World Health Organization data on the algae before collaborating with officials from Hillsboro and Marion to suggest procedures and standards for treatment.
How the new treatment works
Hillsboro water technician Morgan Marler oversaw creation of the new treatment.
It involves injecting powdered activated carbon, normally used to improve water's taste at one point in the treatment process, during a different step in the process so as to remove unsafe quantities of the blue-green anabaena algae and the toxins it has been known to release.
The procedure was devised and tested more than a week before pumping resumed, but officials had to wait for results of the test and had to resolve a resulting problem with the length of time water would be exposed to chlorine.
Marion, which uses a somewhat different treatment process, was able to help, Marion City Administrator David Mayfield said, by showing how it maximized the exposure time to chlorine in its plant.
Marion's plant would have instituted similar procedures at the same time as Hillsboro's plant did on Friday, Mayfield said.
However, with the ready availability of Luta Creek water — "a real luxury," as Waldo put it — he chose to wait until a needed replacement part could be obtained rather than buying an entire new carbon injector costing more than $10,000.
The activated carbon involved is not to be confused with carbon filtering, as was incorrectly indicated in an editorial last week. The newspaper regrets that error.
KDHE cleared both cities to resume using reservoir water June 17 once they were able to implement the new activated carbon treatment procedures. It also announced June 17 that all recreational activity at the reservoir could resume.
Algae rumors debunked
Despite daily inspections by state and federal officials, Waldo said, no anabaena algae has been detected on the lake since then.
A tiny bit of a different type of algae — green, rather than blue-green — did wash ashore last Thursday and create rumors of a new infestation. These turned out to be false, Waldo said.
Mike Knak, maintenance inspector at the reservoir, also debunked another rumor about a supposed fish kill by noting that large groups of carp gathered near the shoreline were not dying but rather were eating, as they normally do, cottonwood seeds that fall onto the water's surface.
Weather, not runoff, blamed
Marion Reservoir's anabaena outbreak has been linked by some experts to agricultural use of chemicals.
However, Waldo said it more likely was caused by unusual weather.
"Runoff can lead to algae blooms," Waldo said Friday, "but the real question here is why anabaena bloomed instead of the more common green algae.
"Dry conditions, lack of discharge from the lake, and unusually clear water allowing sunlight to reach deeper into the lake probably contributed."
