A 3 a.m. water-main break earlier in the month forced customers of the Village of Saugerties water system to boil their water to ensure safety.
“I was notified of a low level of water in the treatment plant,” water plant superintendent Mike Hopf reported to the village board meeting October 20. “It was determined that we had a major break in the system, and we quickly located the leak behind the Smokehouse of the Catskills.”
The break was in one of the two main water transmission lines to the village, Hopf said. “We had to isolate the twelve-inch main and feed the system through the 16-inch main,” he said. “We had the leak stopped by 7:30 a.m.”
The water emergency led to a discussion of new billing software, which has the ability to notify water customers of emergencies quickly. The software has the capacity to deliver messages as well as bills, Hopf said.
Notifying the customers
The village lost some 2.5 million gallons of treated water because of the leak, Hopf said. Water pressure was down throughout the village, and the closest users, including the Grant D. Morse Elementary School, “had no water at all.”
Following a water main break on a major transmission line, state law requires the supplier to issue a boil-water notification for the entire system, Hopf said. Customers were notified through posting on the water department’s website, announcements on cable channel 23, and through posted copies in high-traffic areas like Stewart’s, Speed Mart, some of the restaurants, radio stations and the village Facebook page.
At the beginning of the emergency, Hopf met with the town’s highway superintendent Richard Forbes and equipment operator Joseph Shaffer. They determined that an outside contractor should be called in. Merit Contracting began clearing that afternoon, and by 5 p.m. the break was completely excavated, Hopf said. The failure was caused by the base of large pieces of bluestone on which the twelve-inch pipe was resting, Hopf said. “After 100 years of freezing and thawing, the bluestone acted like a jackhammer on that main,” he said. “We had to replace a twelve-foot section.”
The broken section was removed and a new section of pipe was attached, Hopf said. Disinfectant was poured into the line, which was filled and allowed to disinfect over the next 18 hours. On October 7 the line was placed back in service, and regular testing of the water started.
The state Health Department requires two consecutive clean samples, the first of which was pulled on Friday morning. Samples were collected and tested over the weekend, and on Sunday the boil-water notice was lifted, Hopf said. “We then set about trying to get the word out,” Hopf said. Phone calls and updates to the Facebook page were immediate.
“I want to thank everyone for their help during all this,” said Hopf. “the office staff, my employees, the board, everyone for their phone calls and support during this emergency and major break.”
New billing system
One lesson learned from the emergency was that a better system for communicating emergency information was needed, Hopf said. “Despite all our efforts to contact everyone, people were looking for more immediate ways to be notified. Some even suggested that we have the police going up and down the streets with a bullhorn to let people know.”
The water department has been looking at a new billing system for the past year. “This would replace our current billing software, that is stored on our server,” Hopf said. “The new system is a cloud-based software. Instead of buying the software and having a license agreement with a limited amount of users, you have a subscription service and an unlimited amount of users.”
Among the advantages the system would be “all our customers would have access to their accounts, usage, bills, they could do online bill pay, and a lot of other things people have come to expect in this day and age,” Hopf said. The system could also do is a mass blast through either email or phone or text message.
“The other thing that we are looking at is how quickly we lost so much water,” Hopf continued. “Two-and-a-half million gallons of treated water, it took us two or three days to make that up. We don’t have any measurement or level control on our tank, our three-million-gallon storage tank.”
The measurement is at the plant’s well. Hopf would like to find a way to check the level at the tank, he said. “There’s no electric there, so we’re looking at a solar system.” The measurement would be sent to the department via radio, “and we would always know how much water is in that three-million-gallon tank.”
The present method of checking the tank level is to climb up and look into it. “There’s a hatch at the top, we have a piece of PVC, and we mark measurements onto the PVC and we drop it down into the tank to check the level on it,” Hopf said. “It’s a fully manual process.”
Trustee Jeannine Mayer wanted to know what the new system would cost. “The new software that we’re looking at is around $610 a month for the subscription service,” Hopf replied. “That’s a monthly cost. Our current software we pay regular maintenance fees to the tune of about $5000 per year, so the subscription service would be slightly higher – about $2000 of the top of my head – but what we would get out of it would be a lot better than what we have now. The level control at the tank was estimated at about $30,000. It includes a radio tower, a concrete pad that needs to be poured, the transducer and the solar panel.”
That was the contractor price. The village could reduce some of that cost if some of that work were done in-house.
“You had a trying few days there, but you guys did a great job, turning it around quickly,” summed up mayor William Murphy. “It’s much appreciated.
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