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“We were borderline having to issue a boiling water advisory – that’s how close we came,” said Charles Aligood at Lexington City Council’s meeting this past Thursday. Aligood reported that the Maury Service Authority water treatment plant underwent power surges and outages amid recent thunderstorms in the area on the weekend of July 14-16. The Council member used this incident as an opportunity to remind Council of the importance of modernizing the MSA system.
“Surely there’s been lightning strikes in the past,” Aligood said, “but this particular one caused the pumps to turn off and nobody was there.” Lightning struck near the facility located on Osage Lane, causing its large-capacity water pumps to give way, he said.
The pumps had been operating incorrectly for about 10 to 12 hours before MSA employees returned for work early Monday morning. By the time they arrived, both holding ponds were overflowing and muddy river was close to contaminating the treated drinking water, Aligood explained.
“Fortunately, the MSA staff was able to institute actions to lower levels in their sediment basins. Luckily, we didn’t get over the top with that, but that’s how close we came,” Aligood commented.
If the MSA employees had not been able to stop the crossflow, Aligood said, “it would have necessitated closing off the water system for a while. It was dangerously close – I just want to point that out.”
He continued, “So again, I wanted to stress the need for modernizing that plant. We have the engineering almost in place, all it’s going to take is the money and of course, scheduling the project, but that’s where we are. We’re still on the edge, but we luckily didn’t have our water system shut down for both the city and the county, so cross your fingers and give your appreciation to the MSA staff” Council began brainstorming possible strategies to prevent this situation from reoccurring. Councilmember Leslie Straughan recommended a simple, inexpensive alert system similar to what can be used in residential homes. As a temporary solution until the facility’s equipment is updated, an alert system could notify MSA staff of issues at the plant while their off duty.
Council member Nicholas Betts wondered about the feasibility of having staff constantly monitoring conditions of the plant. Aligood agreed with Straughan that “instrumentation,” or an alert system, seemed like the best short-term solution.
“Investigating why that [fluke] happened is part of the process to do the analysis and then setting up an alarm system – [it] might be short-term, but we’re fixing to spend money to fix all of it as well and certainly that’ll be high on the list to make sure that doesn’t happen again,” said Aligood.
“Things are working fine again. Most of us never knew that it happened, but it did. Again, living on the edge and didn’t know it,” Aligood commented.
