Half a million people in Kansas are under a boil water advisory after the City of Wichita lost power at its main water treatment plant and pump station early Wednesday morning. City officials said it will be 24 hours before they know whether Wichita’s drinking water contains unsafe levels of bacteria.
During the advisory, Wichita water customers are advised to boil water or use bottled water for drinking, washing food and utensils and brushing their teeth. Water needs to be at a rolling boil for one minute before it is safe to use.
Wichita Public Works and Utilities Director Gary Janzen said during a press conference Wednesday morning that the source of this issue can be traced back to generators for the Hess pump station and Wichita water treatment plant.
Janzen said that the city runs those facilities on generator power about once a month, to make sure the backup power system is ready to switch on when it’s needed. Janzen said the city decided to switch to generator power Tuesday evening “out of caution” because of storms overnight.
The storms that rolled through central Kansas were strong enough to collapse a 70-foot section of wall at the Boeing facility in south Wichita and cause local power outages. But Janzen said it was a failure of the generator, not the city’s usual power source, that caused the issue.
“It’s not set up to kick back to primary power,” Janzen said. “Unfortunately, as far as we were aware, primary power was available.”
City staff believe the pump station and treatment plant lost power from the generators around 5 a.m., primarily because that’s when residents began calling to report low water pressure or no water in their homes. Power was down for 45 minutes.
“There’s obviously issues with the alerting in that system that we’re going to be digging into and get a better understanding of why we didn’t know sooner that we lost that power from those generators,” Janzen said.
Pressure loss is key to the city’s problem. KDHE often points out in boil water advisories that a “failure to maintain adequate pressure may result in a loss of chlorine residuals and bacteria contamination.”
The pump station and treatment plant are back up and running on regular power and Janzen said that the water moving through those facilities “is not contaminated, we’re not putting contaminated water into the system.”
Though the director said the city isn’t able to vouch for the water that entered into the water system during the power outage. The outage impacted computers at the water treatment plant that sample and record data on quality of the water being pumped out of the plant and on to customers.
The city is trying to recover that data. In the meantime, it’s taking samples from around its water system to see if there’s been any contamination.
That process will take time.
Wichita provides water to Rose Hill, Park City, Benton, Derby, Valley Center, Bel Aire, Kechi and Sedgwick Country Rural Water District 1, 2 and 3, as well as McConnell Air Force Base. Those contracts make Wichita the water provider for roughly 1 in 6 Kansans.
Water needs to be collected from each part of that network, 195 sites in total. Janzen said the last time the city collected samples from every site, it took four hours. Once those samples are back in a lab, they need 24 hours to culture and reveal how much — if any — bacteria is in the water. He anticipated it would be Thursday afternoon before the first sample results were ready.
The city does have a plan for flushing the system, but Janzen said “we don’t want to start flushing too soon or we could push water that has issues into areas that does not have issues.”
Wichita has been left in limbo waiting for those results. Wichita Public Schools announced at 8:40 a.m. that it was cancelling schools for elementary school buildings that typically open at 9 a.m. The announcement left families trying to find last minute childcare and pick up young students that had already been dropped off at the district’s latchkey programs.
After the city’s morning press conference, USD 259 cancelled afternoon pre-K care, latchkey programs, athletic practices and events on district property. District leaders allowed buildings that were already in session — primarily its middle and high schools — to continue their school day after distributing district-provided food and bottled water.
A USD 259 spokesperson said a decision about whether school would be cancelled going forward, “will be made when more information is available.”
Vice Mayor Dalton Glasscock said that while city leaders are aware of the difficulty the advisory places on residents, leaders “will not gamble with our community’s safety.”
“This is an unfortunate event and we’re working to bring water back to our customers as quickly as possible,” Glasscock said. “The safety of our water is of the utmost importance and a charge we take seriously.”
KDHE will make the final call on when Wichita water is safe enough to remove the boil water advisory.
