Village officials issued a rare notice to boil all water a week ago last Friday night “out of an abundance of caution.” At the July 23 meeting of the village board, mayor Tim Rogers was able to lift the boil notice that Sunday morning.
Some routine tests for coliform bacteria, which can indicate the presence of “potentially harmful microbes,” had higher than usual results. While the tests never exceeded any health standard, the decision was made to flush some water mains and issue the notice to boil water.
Water tested at two village buildings supplied from the same main showed very different results, making the mayor suspicious that some results could have been tainted.
Regardless of the cause, state health officials were satisfied that no further action was warranted.
Warnings that residents should bring all water to a rolling boil for one minute before using it occur in New Paltz. One was in place for several days after Hurricane Irene blew through in 2011.
A portion of village water is obtained via the Catskill Aqueduct, local water captured in reservoirs for the residents of New York City, which operates the country’s largest unfiltered system. State law requires that the water for city residents must be filtered before it’s provided to consumers anywhere else, including New Paltz.
In recent years, wells have added water to the village supply in order to reduce the amount of aqueduct water purchased.
The most common concern about the village supply is a cosmetic one that carries no health risk, Sometimes, the water can be brown, a sign that one of the old iron water mains has been disturbed in some way. The replacement of a mile-long stretch of century-old main under Chestnut Street will likely reduce the number of residents who experience this effect.
Sewer-main replacements have been funded in large part through state grants. A current grant being sought is from a fund for expanding local housing stock. Rogers, reasoning that a more robust sewer system can handle heavier use, is hopeful New Paltz will receive state aid for that purpose.
After years of replacing sewer mains to reduce rainwater seepage during the heaviest precipitation, village officials are also pursuing a grant that could fund the conversion of some old greenhouses into an equalization basin which would serve as a buffer during those events.
There is no simple way to get a boil-water notice to all water users. Email addresses and phone numbers aren’t collected from all residents. The hitherto standard way to share an announcement — putting it in the water bill that’s mailed out – would have been far too slow. On this occasion, officials posted a reminder on Facebook about the various local text-alert services, which included separate notifications for village and town authorities, the town police, and state-level systems.
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