The Herald, Sharon, Pa.

Local News

November 19, 2007

Boil water alert lifted in Greenville; tests uncover no contamination

By Tom Davidson

GREENVILLE — There’s no longer any need to boil Greenville’s water before drinking it.

The state Department of Environmental Protection allowed Greenville Water Authority to lift a boil water advisory Sunday morning, after tests were conclusive that the water wasn’t contaminated with the intestinal parasite giardia.

The notice was lifted at about 8:15 and Mayor Dick Miller, who doubles as authority chairman, said the authority spread the word to local media outlets, churches and the water authority’s two largest customers, Thiel College and UPMC Horizon.

“We didn’t want to go into Thanksgiving with people having an inconvenience,” Miller said.

So authority workers went into overdrive to take apart, inspect and repair the water plant’s four filters. Three of them were working Sunday, enough to lift the order, Miller said.

DEP has said that three working filters are enough to ensure that giardia doesn’t contaminate the treated water.

“I thought they (authority workers) did a good job under extreme pressure,” Miller said.

It was yet another test for Greenville’s 3,000-customer water system, where boil water advisories are not unexpected.

“We don’t have the resources that other systems do,” Miller said.

The authority lacks the manpower of larger utilities and resources like an in-house lab and a cache of spare parts, Miller said.

He emphasized that the boil water notice was an “advisory” and didn’t mean the water wasn’t safe to drink, just that it might not be safe.

“It was important to err on the side of caution,” Miller said.

Because of the inconvenience posed to customers, the authority is giving them a 25 percent discount on their next water bill.

Customers with delinquent bills do not qualify.

Board members estimate the authority will lose $75,000 on that discount, but felt they had to give something back to the customers for dealing with the boil alert.

The alert was issued Nov. 7 when DEP found high levels of giardia in the Shenango River, the water treatment plant’s water source. At that time, authority employees said they needed until Nov. 21 to inspect and repair the filtration system, which DEP said wasn’t functioning at full capacity.

DEP’s tests of the treated water were inconclusive that giardia was present, but the boil alert was issued as a precaution, said Eric Buzza, an operations specialist with the authority’s engineer, Gannett Fleming Inc. of Mercer.

Those test results may have been inconclusive because an aluminum-based chemical called flock used to remove contaminants from the river water could have interfered with the presence of giardia, Buzza said.

The flock may not have filtered the water properly, but it wouldn’t have made it to the treated water supply, he said.

When DEP tested the untreated water and filtration system about two weeks ago, it tested only one of the four filters and that filter happened to be one that wasn’t functioning properly, said Thomas L. Thompson, a senior project manager with Gannett Fleming.

If DEP had tested a different filter that was working at full capacity, the test results wouldn’t have been inconclusive and a boil alert may not have been issued, Thompson said.

The water authority board will meet Tuesday to discuss hiring a team of specialists from Thiel to investigate the water situation, including how and why it happened and how to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

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