Water plant pump limits and manganese flare prompt contingency planning at Rancho Murieta CSD

District operations staff reported July 14 that one plant pump is operating at roughly 75% capacity, reducing system margin and prompting contingency planning, and that a June manganese spike prompted a short precautionary notification that was later rescinded.

Travis, the operations presenter, said June production totaled roughly 50.6 million gallons across the two plants and current daily production is around 2.45 million gallons. He told the board one pump is producing about 520 gallons per minute rather than its normal ~700 gpm after an equipment failure and that staff plan to pull and inspect the pump when the plant is taken offline.

“That pump is now only running at 75%, and I can't pull it right now to repair it,” Travis said. He outlined options for the board and improvements committee to consider, including rehabilitating or replacing pumps and, as a temporary measure, arranging pumper trucks with regional partners to move raw water if needed.

Travis also described a manganese event on June 19 that produced a short code-red notification procedure. He said the running annual average reporting threshold is 0.05 and that monitoring indicated the water did not reach that threshold in storage tanks (the highest reading reported was about 0.04 in one tank). Out of caution staff issued a notification and later rescinded it after consulting a process/chemical engineer and continuing increased monitoring.

Staff emphasized lab turnaround time (about two days) as a constraint on same‑day operational decisions and said they will bring additional information and options to the Improvements Committee, including cost estimates for new pumps and possible interim measures.

What’s next: Operations will provide contingency options and cost estimates at the improvements committee for board consideration.