slideshow

Nola Sizemore

Staff Writer

Lifting a water conservation ban, Evarts Mayor Eddie Manning said by drilling an existing well a little deeper, sufficient water is now available for all their customer’s normal use.

“After the events of Memorial Day weekend with our water department, we decided to fix our water issues now instead of letting it get worse,” said Manning. “We sat down and asked ourselves three questions: what happened, why it happened and how are we going to fix it? We knew we had to fix this before the drought got worse and our two elementary schools were back in session.”

Manning said before Memorial Day, their water department was producing 650,000 to 750,000 gallons of water per day and that was not enough water to supply their customers sufficiently.

“The first thing we did was to hire Kenvirons Inc. to do leak detection because we knew that would be an immediate help to us,” said Manning. “While working on the leak detection, the drought really started affected our wells and mine supply water. We dropped over 100 gallons per minute on production due to the drought. We had two wells in Dartmont, 40 feet apart which were both drilled at 155 feet. Instead of drilling a new well at a cost of about $40,000, we decided to drill one of our wells another 150 feet deeper to get into another water table.”

Manning said the city already had the pump, electrical, water lines and casing, so the expense of drilling one well deeper was much cheaper than drilling a new well.

“Preliminary reports from our driller indicate we may have hit a water table capable of producing 200 gallons per minute,” said Manning. “Basically, what we have been able to do with these plans are to save over 210,000 gallons of treated water per day through out leak detection. We estimated our water loss dropped from 55 to 60 percent to just 10 to 15 percent. This, in turn, has saved us money in chemicals and electricity. Our high service pumps run times have been cut in half. We have gone from distributing 650,000 gallons of water per day to 440,000 gallons of water per day.”

Manning said if the Dartmont well works “as well as he thinks it will” the city should be able to shut off one of their wells that has a great deal of iron in it, saving the city even more money on chemicals.

“After hiring Kenvirons and drilling the well, we have spent approximately $13,000,” said Manning. “Just the savings of water will pay for this in no time plus our maintenance men learned enough about leak detection from Kenvirons that we will be much better prepared at doing this ourselves from now on. My water department personnel said this is the best shape our water department has been in for the past 10 years, based on production vs distribution.”

Reach Nola Sizemore at 606-573-4510 or at nsizemore@heartlandpublications.com