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Residents flag repeated water outages; council approves SCADA change order and seeks better emergency notice
Summary
After public commenters reported cloudy water and outages, council and public works clarified a DNRC notice did not authorize new wells and approved a contractor change order for SCADA telemetry. Council directed improvements to notifications and after-hours contact procedures.
Marilyn Wolf, a Creekide Meadows resident and former Stevensville council member, told the council two recent water-system failures left homes without water and produced “milky, murky” water full of tiny bubbles when service resumed, and urged a formal town policy requiring immediate testing and automatic public notices after outages.
Town public-works staff and consultants responded that the outages were tied to control-system and power issues, not to new drilling. Staff read a statement from consulting hydrogeologist Jared Bean explaining that a recent DNRC public notice had caused confusion: Stevensville is not proposing to drill or pump new wells, the notice would instead add existing Twin Creeks wellfield points of diversion to an unperfected water-right permit, and it “does not and cannot increase the already authorized flow rate and volume.”
Council unanimously approved a contractor change order recommended by HDR Engineering to add telemetry/SCADA panel hardware needed to achieve required controls. HDR’s recommendation denied two other contractor requests (for operator workstation hardware and HMI software) as unjustified, and approved the additional telemetry hardware; staff said the $5,789.60 cost will be charged to the project contingency and will not increase the total project budget.
Officials said the SCADA system failed to notify operators during at least one outage and that a separate power interruption also contributed. HDR and plant staff are testing multiple scenarios to ensure the system will call on-call operators. The mayor and council directed staff to add backup emergency contact numbers to the after-hours phone tree, improve town phone messaging, and record callers’ contact information so customers receive follow-up after reporting outages.
“People need to go to work, take a shower, coffee, get the kids off to school,” Wolf said, urging automated notification and prompt testing after outages. Staff said operators perform required EPA and state sampling and that meter and production reports will continue to be submitted as required.
Next steps: HDR will continue scenario testing for alarm and phone notifications and staff will implement revised after-hours contact procedures; the water and sewer committee will continue its work and has scheduled regular meetings for further technical review.
