By DAVE SCHULTZ
Mark Sullivan thinks he knows why the city’s water service is carrying H20 that some people have questions about, and he reiterated a solution he had proposed last month — flush out the city’s water lines through fire hydrants.
Not the routine effort that is done once or twice a year. What he wants to see is a high-powered push that will move water at 5 feet per second through the cast iron mains, predominately in the downtown area, that will reduce the scaling now being pumped through the city’s water lines.
Sullivan is the CEO of Midwestern Engineers, the company that designed the upgrades to the city’s water system. He believes — and on Tuesday he cited industry and state leaders to back him up — that the cause of the impurities in the water since the new water treatment plant was put into service is geographical in nature. The city’s old water treatment plant was on Compromise Lane on the north side of the city, meaning that much of the city’s water flowed north to south. The new plant, off of State Street on the city’s southern edge, means the water flows from south to north.
“The flow direction has changed,” Sullivan told Tuesday night’s meeting of the Bluffton Board of Public Works and Safety. Everyone he’s spoken to, he said, told him the same thing: “The change in flow direction is probably the culprit that’s causing the problem.”
Sullivan produced reports that reviewed the state’s analysis of the water coming out of the filtration plant last month and the water that the Parlor City Brewing Co. is using to brew its beer. The water is coming out of the plant at a 5 on the hardness scale and is getting to the brewery at 15.
That’s why Sullivan believes that it’s water kicking scaling loose inside the city’s aging downtown water mains that causing problems with water service downtown. Conversations with members of the Alliance of Indiana Rural Water — a group that the city of Bluffton belongs to — and Matt Prater, the drinking water branch chief for the Indiana Department of Environmental Management, have given Sullivan support in his belief.
What needs to be done, he said, is an “aggressive” flushing program. The water distribution system needs to be shut off at various locations to force faster and more pressurized water discharge through hydrants.
Sullivan said the amount of time and water it will take to clear the lines is not yet known. He will try to put a plan together during the next couple of weeks. Sullivan said he understands that the Bluffton Free Street Fair is scheduled for the third week of September, so he expects the flushing program will be done during the last week of the month — after the fair ends on Saturday, Sept. 24.
He’s been told that the amount of flushing needed to clear the lines might require a flow of 1,500 gallons per minute — and that some advisors have told him that 20 minutes to as much as 16 hours could be needed to clear the scaling out of the lines.
daves@news-banner.com
