Update on Main Break February 12, 2010

Many calls and inquiries have come in concerning our water outage and low pressure incident on Friday afternoon.  District staff attended to emergency response conditions based on the following circumstances:

The District began receiving low pressure calls from its southeast service area at approximately 11:40 AM on Friday, February 12, 2010.  After monitoring the District’s SCADA system to validate the event, the CDPH was notified by the District’s registered emergency response representative as appropriate with District policy and as mandated by state health codes.  The Interim GM was then notified while he was offsite attending to other District Compliance Order engineering issues.  He returned to the office within minutes to oversee the call to order planning and delegate responsiveness duties to staff.

The incident in question prompted additional CDPH oversight and management due to the complexity of the situation and the size of the affected area.  To protect the public, a boil water order was issued as a precautionary measure until the parameters of the incident could be identified and isolated to a smaller area. As soon as the cause of the low pressure was found and isolated, the circumstances were relayed to CDPH and the boil water order was lifted except for approximately 9 customers in the affected isolation area.  With isolation, the surrounding water system was protected from contamination and the pressures returned to normal within minutes.  Additionally, although our SCADA system registered low pressures, they never actually dropped below the levels necessary to issue a boil water order, and the section of main involved did not contain intersections or laterals where dirty water could have been introduced.

A cease order was then issued by the GM at approximately 2:15 PM after 4 area schools and several residents had received notifications.  The District promptly issued a rescind notice on our website and provided a customer awareness statement on our answering machine. Unfortunately, the school notifications could not be retracted.

The repair was made by a California A licensed contractor that lasted well into the night with constant District vigilance and supervision.  The breach was repaired, sanitized, flushed and tested per state and District standards with better than satisfactory results.  Our reports are available upon request.

The public was never in danger, but our emergency directives and responsiveness duties require that we go above normal situation preparedness to ensure the water system remains sanitized and healthy.  This is our number one priority in any circumstance.    

The District regrets any inconvenience and concern the public had during this emergency event. We have been in post-event contact with CDPH officials to provide our emergency response incident reports and provide the results of our bacteriological sampling that came back clean after the required 48 hours of sampling and monitoring.  In return, the Department has provided necessary directives to provide follow up data and additional field reports.

We are also implementing extra safeguards in our Procedures Manual after receiving comments from customers who did not call in or visit our website after the 48 hour boil order had been lifted.  We trust our notification process will improve as a result of this unfortunate incident and we welcome any statements our customers wish to provide.