SEAL ROCK — The unexpected failure of a water-quality sensor at some point over the past few days left many Seal Rock Water District customers with salty-tasting water in their pipes.
Although district officials and engineers are still working to determine exactly what went wrong, almost all of the high-saline water has already been flushed from the system, Adam Denlinger, the district’s general manager, said Thursday.
“We had a salinity probe that failed and was not detecting proper levels of salinity,” he said. “Unfortunately, as we discovered that, a small amount of salinity made it into the system undetected.”
Seal Rock Water District’s customers live from South Beach to Bayshore. The district has about 2,600 total connections serving about 5,500 customers. The average demand is close to 230,000 gallons a day.
The probe that failed is located at the district’s new, $15 million water intake system on Beaver Creek. As soon as engineers realized there was a problem, they shut down the intake and switched over to secondary sources, Denlinger said.
The probe’s failure didn’t result in a system-wide influx of salty water, Denlinger said. Instead, the problem was limited to areas closer to the heart of the system around Seal Rock.
He also noted that water samples obtained by district operators throughout the event showed levels in the drinking water system well below the maximum contaminant level for salinity.
“We are doing everything we should be doing and, fortunately, we got on top of this when it happened,” Denlinger said. “But we realize it’s problematic for our customers and we are deeply sorry for that.”
Over the past few days about a dozen customers phoned in with complaints of high levels of salinity in their drinking water. The district is urging affected customers to turn on their own taps for five to 10 minutes to flush any remaining salt out of their lines, Delinger said.
Work is also ongoing to determine why the probe failed.
Looking ahead, and knowing that elevated saline levels are not only predicted, but expected, at the Beaver Creek intake, Denlinger said an additional analyzer will be placed there soon to give testing an extra level of redundancy. In addition, a third such probe will also be added to the part of the system where finished drinking water is pumped out to customers.
— Dana Tims/YachatsNews
Do customers that have to flush get a discount for having to waste all that water? Should we need to flush our hot water tanks?