In Morrisville: During flood, water was safe all along

Scott Johnstone, the utility’s manager, said this week that although he understands state officials’ job is to protect public health, he was frustrated that Morrisville was one of only two towns in Vermont during the flood of July 10-11 ordered by the state to issue a Do Not Drink notice, when dozens of other towns in similar situations were able to get along with a less severe boil notice.

“What was the difference between us and everybody else in the state, where we needed to be the people that went to a Do Not Drink?” Johnstone said. “Because that created a few things in town. That created the public believing that there must be something seriously wrong, when the tests were now proving that there wasn’t, that we were correct all along.”

However, Ben Montross, drinking water program manager with the Agency of Natural Resources, said this week that the agency, in the absence of hard data proving the water was safe, acted out of “a preponderance of caution.” He said there are generally two types of contaminants that can get into water — organic bacteria like E. coli and “inorganic compounds” that can range from nitrates and nitrites to heavy metals to fuel.

With bacteria, drinking water operators can get by on a less severe boil notice, until they can clean out the system with chlorine. With the other compounds, it becomes a waiting game to see if any noxious things got in.

“It’s a much better and safer call to prevent something from happening, in terms of a do-not-drink order, versus everybody gets sick, or everyone has an adverse reaction to the water,” Montross said. “It’s a lot easier to prevent that by being cautious than it is to respond to it after the fact.”

The way of water

Morrisville’s drinking water system works this way: The utility’s three wells are located in a field between the Lamoille River and Route 15A, just west of where the river flows under Tenney Bridge. Every night — around 10 p.m., when fewer customers are likely to be using electricity — the system automatically pumps water from the wells to fill the village’s two large water reservoirs.

Johnstone said crews were confident that the system automatically stopped pumping the night before the river jumped its banks early on July 11, stopping any water from flowing into the reservoirs. However, Johnstone is an engineer by training, and he noted those types of people tend not to deal in absolutes, and he could only express that he was “99.4 percent certain, like the Ivory commercial,” that the water systems had been separated after the pumps shut off because the reservoirs were full.

Johnstone said the utility first issued a boil notice on its own at 6:30 a.m. on July 11, before calling the state — a decision that took “literally about two minutes” to make.

However, when the utility relayed this to the Agency of Natural Resources drinking water folks, they also mentioned that the wells had been submerged by the river.

They also said they were certain no water left the wells and entered the system, but all the state heard was the wells were submerged and ordered the utility to issue a Do Not Drink notice.

What followed was four days of waiting for water samples showing the water was free of inorganic compounds — as opposed to bacteria like E. coli, which can be mitigated by having customers boil the water until the utility can clean things out with chlorine.

According to test results drawn from the utility’s drinking system on July 11 — which took three days to come back — the water showed safe levels of more than 40 different compounds, from more familiar ones like mercury and manganese, benzine and barium, to complicated sounding ones with common nicknames, such as tetrachloroethene, also known as dry-cleaning fluid.

Everyone’s different

Montross said his division regulates all the state’s public drinking water systems, and they all have “a baseline for what is in the water or isn’t” that they can compare following a flood. However, Morrisville wasn’t given the benefit of the doubt and the turnaround time to test for inorganic compounds.

He said all the agency had to go on was Morrisville Water & Light’s self-reporting that the well head had been overrun.

“The issue with respect to the wells being under flooded water, beyond the bacteriological, is what else? Is there a gas station nearby? Are there leaking oil tanks nearby? Has a farm recently provided seed and fertilizer and are things like that getting into the water?” Montross said.

Montross said although most situations across the state involved some sort of water line break, which drops storage tank levels and can potentially invite bacterial pathogens, the state handled every water system on an individual basis. Barre City, for instance, pulls from surface water sources for its supply, and it couldn’t adequately filter all that churned up water, so it had to issue a boil notice.

The only other town in the state that had to issue a Do Not Drink order was Woodstock, and that happened when a portion of its distribution system that runs under the Ottauquechee River broke.

“Nothing is by a script,” he said. “We go system by system.”

A week of frustration

Johnstone said the utility’s phones rang nonstop with angry customers. Some businesses either shut down for a few days or spent significant money sourcing potable water. Churches and private industry — like local well drillers Manosh Corporation — provided thousands of gallons of water to the community at various pick-up spots.

And all the while, the 1.9 million gallons of water in the reservoirs was safe to drink.

In a flurry of emails between him and various agency officials during the week following the flood, Johnstone could sometimes barely mask his frustration.

“Frankly, I’d like your help in answering this question. It does seem, at face value, that Morrisville has been treated very differently than everyone else in the state,” Johnstone wrote in an email to officials at the state’s drinking water division on Wednesday, July 12, the day after the do not drink order was issued.

Janelle Wilbur, compliance section supervisor with the state drinking water program said a statewide boil notice had not been issued, and said decisions were made based on talks with water system operators.

“Morrisville Water & Light is not being singled out,” Wilbur wrote. “As indicated during previous conversations with staff, contaminated water had entered your storage tanks, the current water quality is unknown, and both of the system’s shallow, gravel well sources are particularly vulnerable to contamination from the Lamoille River.”

On July 14, three days into the do not drink order, Johnstone wrote back reiterating that the state health department and natural resources agencies were giving mixed signals about what the water could or could not be used for — drinking? No. Showering? Depends on who you ask.

“If we can get to a boil water notice, that would restore public confidence in both what people are being told and in their compliance with the order incredibly in my estimation,” he wrote, adding “the changing guidance on what the water can or cannot be used for has had very deleterious effects on credibility. Facebook chatting has people googling odd sources of information and now controls the narrative.”

It would be another 24 hours before the state lifted the do not drink order, and Morrisville Water & Light could revert to a boil notice. All told, the village would spend four days under the more severe order, and another four days being told to boil the water as the utility worked to rid the remaining wells of any bacteria with copious amounts of chlorine.

This week, with nearly a month of distance from that long, thirsty week, Johnstone said he thinks state officials reacted in the way they saw fit, noting the agency was dealing with 30-40 different towns whose drinking water supplies were compromised or in danger. Still, he said the vantage point is different from on the ground and in Montpelier.

“Everybody on every side is trying to do right by public health,” he said. “My sense is that, throughout the rest of the state, they trusted their local partner, which is the water operators. For some reason, in our case, when we said we were confident that we separated (the water) in time, they didn’t believe us.”