Printable VersionThousands of Lake Havasu City residents woke up to find dry taps in their homes — the first time since the city started keeping records.
 Jayne Hanson/News-Herald Photo Butch Wood, Lake Havasu City Public Works Water Division utility supervisor, points out elements of the city’s primary horizontal water collection well that is located in London Bridge Beach on the Island. |
Mark Clark, Lake Havasu City Public Works director, said he has never experienced a systems-wide failure in his 16 years of service.
“It has never happened before,” Clark said. “We were notified about 6:30 a.m. (Sunday) morning.”
Dori Pace, water division administrative technician, said she answered hundreds of calls by 9 a.m. Sunday from residents who thought it was their own plumbing leaving them dry. Pace also said one or two customers were simply angry to little or no water flow when they awoke.
Thirty city water division workers began a manual manipulation of the pumps to restore the water system. Crewmen said it took eight or nine tries to fire the pumps back up.
Other crewmen monitored the restoration’s progress, and some were deployed around the city to check fire hydrants and bleed air from empty water lines.
“The failure was between the water treatment plant and the water collection well, which is the primary water source for the entire (water) system,” said Butch Wood, utility supervisor for Lake Havasu City Public Works Department Water Division. “(The reason) has not been identified yet.”
Water services were restored about 11:30 a.m. Sunday, but Wood said it would take about 24 hours for each of the storage tanks to reach their six- to eight-million gallon capacity.
The ordeal began after pumps stopped manipulating ground water into the 106-foot-deep primary collector tank sometime Saturday night or early Sunday. The city’s primary collector tank is located in London Bridge Beach Park on the Island. Once collected, the ground water is funneled through a treatment process to rid it of naturally occurring toxins. This is addressed at the city’s water treatment plant, located on Aviation Court.
The purpose of the water treatment plant is to prepare water for 15 water-storage tanks located within the city’s four water zones. Zone 1 is located near the Lake, and the zones progress in number to Zone 4, which encompasses the eastern most portion of the city.
“Nine of the 15 pumps were critical (Sunday) morning,” Wood said. “In 31 years, we have never got into a critical situation — or that this scenario has happened.”
Once the water system returns to capacity, the water division officials shut down the pumps so they can be re-started in an automatic system mode.
The overall system is linked to an automatic electronic system called Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition, or SCADA, which notifies on-call system operators when the pumps have failed or if water levels are low in the collection tank or storage tanks.
For an unknown reason Sunday, SCADA did not alert personnel to the deficient water levels or pump failure alerts.
Brent Morris, water division production field supervisor, said SCADA alerts workers on a monthly basis but for small-scale issues. The 24-foot tall holding tanks fluctuate between 17- and 21-feet of water, 17 being considered low. On Sunday morning, SCADA was showing about 6-inches of water in the bottom of some of the water-storage tanks.
The affected service area included city water zones 1 and 2 providing water to residents on Avalon Avenue and Outrigger Drive in the north portion of the city to Osborn Drive south of State Route 95. All of Acoma Boulevard from both its connections on SR95, and Corvair Drive and Thunderbolt Avenue on the south area of the city as well as everything down toward the Lake, said Water Division Manager Chuck Michalski.
Wood said the water systems were “on the recovery” but crews were still watching everything closely.
“It looks like the worst is behind us,” Wood said.
Six of the city’s 12 450-horsepower pumps pumped about 20,000 gallons-per-minute of water into the treatment plant facility Sunday before the storage tanks could begin to be replenished. Three pumps supplied storage tanks that feed water to the northern affected area and three that feed water to the tanks that supply the south.
Lake Havasu City residents consume as many as 24 million gallons of water in a day, Wood said. During the winter months the daily average is about 10 million gallons per day.
You may contact the reporter at jhanson@havasunews.com.
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