Grindstone water treatment plant floods after equipment blows
Equipment blew and the plant flooded
Water production manager
Speaking to councilors at their regular meeting, Koehn tentatively attributed the cause of the incident to a high pressure surge that occurred and a failure of the controls on the surge anticipator.
"That's what we're leaning towards, but no one was out of water and no one was hurt," he said. "If someone had been in the building when it blew, it might have been a different story. The public wasn't in any danger. When we can solve those issues like that, it doesn't get much better."
Crawford told Koehn that he and village crews "did an awesome job."
"We did a lot of work in 3 1/2 days," Koehn agreed. "It kind of tells you what your guys are made of when you have an emergency like that. Nobody wants it, but when it happened, we were there to do the best we could."
Councilor
Koehn said he and staff are thinking about building a wall separating pumps and electrical equipment. They intend to stock spare parts for everything.
"It makes you think about lot of thing," he said. "If we had not had an extra VFD (vertical frequency drive) it would have been a big problem. Without interconnection, we would be in a hurt, but it was done years ago and we could use other wells to supplement."
The Grindstone plant normally provides about 30 percent of the village's water supply and specifically serves the historic tourist shopping area of midtown.
About
"A lot of times we gets alarms and we give them a little while and they reset," he said. "But we got a couple that came in right after and I figured something was up."
When he and a crew member arrived onsite, they could see the plant was flooding.
"We estimated about 3 feet coming out the door," Koehn said. "I told him don't go inside, just try to isolate it."
The rest of crew arrived at
"Once we did that, we shut down the building and made sure everything was good before we went in," he said. "Basically, we figure the 8-inch pipe that connects to the check valve blew. We don't know why, but we have a couple of hunches. One is a pressure surge and part of the other reason is that the control valves screwed up. We think it was a combination of a couple of things."
A few engineers looked at the situation, but the answer still is puzzling, he said.
"We had to rebuild the surge anticipator," he said. "We lost about 15 feet from the 47 feet tank level when it blew. That's 775,860 gallons. The lowest level on Saturday was 26.6 feet and now we're averaging adding about one foot a day (in the tank). Everyone worked as team. It was back on line by
The water was removed from the plant. equipment was dried out, although some items "were fried," he said. Power was restored to restart the plant and they installed a new VFD that runs the vertical pump.
"Luckily, we had a backup," Koehn said. "A crane company had to come in, because when it blew, it shifted everything about six inches and the pump had to be reset."
Walls were washed, everything was super-chlorinated for up to six hours. Plates were welded. Wet insulation was pulled. The surge anticipator was rebuilt. The timing for roof repairs will depend on the weather, he said. He has a quote to replace lighting and outlets.
The final price tag for damages is estimated at
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