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Emery council accepts water master plan; engineer flags fire-flow gaps and recommends main replacements
Summary
After a consultant presentation, Emery Town Council accepted a water master plan with corrections. The plan finds the system meets peak demand but lacks required fire-flow capacity in large portions of town and recommends replacing small mains and scheduling maintenance.
Emery Town Council on Nov. 12 accepted a water master plan presented by consultant Kiel that finds the town’s system meets peak-day and peak-instantaneous demand but falls short on fire-flow capacity in many locations.
Kiel told the council the model shows the distribution system maintains required residual pressure for daily and instantaneous peaks but “where it’s lacking… is Fireflow,” noting most problem areas are fed by 2-inch mains. He recommended replacing critical 2-inch mains with 8-inch mains and adding two additional pressure-reducing valves to create a more effective looped system. “That fixes your fire flow in every scenario, in every location,” he said during the presentation.
The consultant said the treatment plant has two 150-gallon-per-minute trains (one normally operated, with the second available for redundancy) and that the town’s treated-storage capacity (about 500,000 gallons) exceeds the municipal requirement of roughly 288,000 gallons. “You have sufficient source… you don’t need to build another storage tank right now,” Kiel said, while also urging the council to plan for replacement of aging assets such as the tank in roughly 20 years.
Kiel described trade-offs tied to upsizing mains: longer, looped 8-inch lines can risk stagnant water where those mains are infrequently used, so the town should adopt flushing and maintenance measures alongside any upgrades. He also identified hydrant flow examples—many areas below 1,000 gallons per minute, with some hydrants around 800 gpm—and reiterated the state and fire code benchmarks typically use 1,500 gpm as a planning figure.
The council moved to accept the water assessment and plan “with the anticipated corrections” and approved the motion by voice vote. The consultant said final bound reports and GIS shapefiles would be delivered in the next one to two weeks and offered training for town staff on ArcGIS Online.
What happens next: the plan includes construction-cost estimates and a recommended priority list. Council members and the conservancy/special service district will coordinate on project prioritization and potential state funding applications.
Attribution: Quotes and technical findings in this article are drawn from Consultant Kiel (Speaker 5) during the presentation and from council members during the acceptance vote.
