Saint John Water is ‘confident’ the situation which caused the widespread boil water order earlier this month won’t happen again, as the root cause of the problem is said to have been fixed.
An incident report on this has been completed and presented to Common Council. Water Commissioner Brent McGovern told council that while sometimes the cause of boil water orders are straightforward this one was slightly more complex.
There were three power outages over two days and during the third the water supply pump didn’t start so no water went to the chlorinator. The root cause was identified as an issue with the pressure switch on the back-up system, which hadn’t been reprogrammed from its factory settings which were different than what was required for the system.
“The normal operating pressure in this line…is normally operating around 103 [pounds per square inch] and at some point after the 2nd power outage the pressure in that water line briefly spiked above 105 PSI however that didn’t immediately have an impact…so once the pressure set point went above the 105 PSI it briefly exceeded the pressure which prevented that back-up system from operating,” explains McGovern.
They have changed the settings on the pressure switch to the design required settings, reprogrammed the spare they have on hand and they’ve also updated the as-built drawings to reflect the designed pressure settings. Common Council voted at its meeting Monday evening to have staff undertake further action on this file and report back in July.
McGovern issued an apology during that meeting.
“With that I’d like to thank council and the public for their patience as we worked through to understand the root cause and to really apologize for the users of the system for any inconveniences that they’ve experienced.”
The boil water order impacted roughly 45,000 people which represents around 60-percent of the city’s customer base. It was issued on May 9 and lifted on May 12. The incident report says if this happened after the major clean drinking water project was completed it wouldn’t have resulted in a boil order.
