State orders upgrade of Westerly, RI, water system

The Providence Journal

ANDREW GOLDSMITH Journal Staff Writer

December 12, 2000

WESTERLY - With 38,000 people enduring Westerly's fourth drinking-water crisis in a decade, state officials have ordered the town to install permanent disinfecting equipment at its wells, June Swallow, chief of the state's Office of Drinking Water Quality, said yesterday.

Since Thursday, when tests revealed fecal coliform bacteria in the public water supply, customers including some in nearby Pawcatuck, Conn. have been boiling tap water, or lugging bottled water home from stores.

Weekly water samples collected Monday revealed the bacteria, which are not dangerous themselves but usually indicate the presence of human or animal waste. After further tests confirmed the result, the state advised residents to boil their tap water for at least one minute before drinking it or using it for cooking, washing dishes, brushing teeth, hand-washing or ice-making.

Julie Passaretti, a teacher at Little People of Westerly, started boiling water for the child-care center and kindergarten at 6 a.m. yesterday. At times, she had six pots going at once.

"We just had to keep boiling, put it in the sink [to cool], put it in the fridge, boil again," she said.

McQuade's Marketplace, in downtown Westerly, was sold out of bottled water at $2.19 for 212 gallons within hours of Thursday's announcement, and immediately brought in a special trailer of it.

Town Engineer Neftali Soto, working in yesterday's snow, said he still had not identified the source of contamination.

Westerly Hospital has reported no cases of water-related illness this week.

Westerly operates the ninth-largest water system in the state, based on the number of people served. Its system is the largest in Rhode Island that is not continuously disinfected.

Officials from the Rhode Island Department of Health have been urging the town to install disinfecting facilities for at least 12 years, Swallow said. Chlorination is the most common method of disinfection.

Late Thursday night, Swallow ordered the town to install permanent disinfection equipment. Engineers will determine exactly where the equipment will be installed. It could cost the town up to $300,000.

There is no deadline for the work, Swallow said.

Town Council President Samuel Azzinaro, elected last month, said yesterday that the town will follow the state's mandate.

As for the past, "if you eliminate the times that there was a problem, then we've been in very good shape with the water supply," he said.

Asked for a possible timetable for the installation, Azzinaro said he didn't have one in mind.

Swallow said yesterday that providing equipment to ensure a constant supply of chlorine in the water is "the cautious thing to do," because then "small instances of contamination can be dealt with by the system itself."

Westerly officials began short-term disinfection with chlorine Thursday night. They said they would let the chlorine spread through the system for a couple of days, then test the water again.

The advisory to boil water will remain in place until tests on three consecutive days show that the water is clean.

Fecal coliform appeared in Westerly in October 1990; August 1994; and October 1998, Swallow said. Another situation cropped up in September 1996, when water samples exceeded federal standards for total coliform levels. But the critical type of the bacteria fecal coliform did not appear, so residents did not need to boil their water.

Seagull droppings are considered the likely cause of the 1998 contamination, when residents had to boil water for 25 days before it tested clean.

According to Soto, the town has not installed permanent chlorination equipment because officials have been awaiting new federal quality standards on groundwater that might affect the type of treatment needed.

The town studied several permanent disinfection techniques after the 1998 contamination. The most expensive would cost up to about $300,000, Soto said.

The exact cost would depend in part on how much chlorine taste customers are willing to tolerate in their water, he said a factor that has produced opposition to disinfection in the past. Cheaper disinfection leaves the water with a stronger taste, he said.

The issue of disinfecting the water supply has been a recurring one, even precipitating a lawsuit against Westerly by the State of Connecticut, which wanted disinfection and filtration on behalf of the system's Pawcatuck customers. Both procedures are required by law in Connecticut.

A settlement was reached in August, after 212 years of litigation. Under the deal, both sides agreed to work together to resolve problems arising if water supplied to the Connecticut side of the border violated that state's standards.

Fecal coliform has appeared consistently this week only in the Bradford section of Westerly. But the entire system is at risk, Soto said, because all of its pipes interconnect.

Westerly's water comes from 10 wells around town that draw from natural underground supplies.

Town officials on Thursday shut down a well in Bradford.

John Sutcliffe, the School Department's maintenance director, personally covered all 55 water fountains in the town's public schools Thursday night. Yesterday morning, he distributed 160 gallons of bottled water to school nursing offices.

He said he followed the same procedure in 1998.

Sodexho Marriott Services, which runs the school cafeterias, is boiling all of its cooking water and using bottled water to wash fruits and vegetables.

Many of the town's hotels and motels are closed for the winter, so Westerly-Pawcatuck Chamber of Commerce President Sean McGill said restaurants will be his top concern while the boil-water advisory is in effect.

"It's an inconvenience, but it hasn't caused them to shut their doors ... or lose business," he said.