Get Full Government Meeting Transcripts, Videos, & Alerts Forever!
Get email alerts on the Water Supply topic
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
Council member reports water-plant communications failure; Bloomfield supplied about 436,000 gallons
Summary
A council member told the village council that a combination of scheduled tower work, an electrical reconfiguration and a communications outage left crews running the water plant manually over a weekend; nearby Bloomfield provided roughly 436,000 gallons of water at no cost, officials said.
A council member reported to the village council that the municipal water plant experienced a cascade of failures that forced staff to run parts of the system by hand over one weekend.
The speaker said a tower was taken down for painting when the electric company’s annual work on the line produced an unexpected power spike that "blew all of our communications out of the tower," knocking out remote controls. With telemetry offline, operators ran the plant manually and battled a leak on Long and Mine while demand rose. "Bloomfield stepped up and they actually provided us a little over, according to their meter today, about 436,000 gallons," the council member said, adding that Bloomfield did not charge the village for that water.
Why it matters: the disruption showed the village’s limited redundancy for both power and communications at a critical utility and underscored reliance on neighboring systems for emergency relief. Council members said the injected supply allowed the plant to rest and avoid a service loss while crews finished repairs.
The speaker described the sequence as "one thing after another," with hours of measurable drawdown at the tower and restrictions on nonessential watering up north while crews kept up with repairs. The leak at Long and Mine was reported as being finished or near completion at the time of the update.
Council members publicly thanked South Woodfield and Bloomfield for providing personnel, supply and food for crews during the recovery. No formal emergency declaration tied to this incident was recorded in the meeting minutes during the report.
The council also discussed following up with a utilities committee meeting; members agreed to meet Wednesday at 4:00 p.m. to review the plant’s status and next steps.
