Bradenton residents told to boil their water

A little after 8 p.m. Monday, residents across the city lost water or experienced a reduction in flow. Initially reported as a water main break, city officials now say it was a technical issue that caused the 45-minute water outage.

Though water service was restored quickly, the city Tuesday issued a boil-water notice for all Bradenton water customers, after initially stating Monday that the water was safe to drink. Officials announced late Tuesday that the “precautionary” notice is expected to stand until Thursday afternoon.

The late announcements and back-and-forth decision on issuing a notice has left many frustrated and confused.

Posts on Facebook indicate the city’s late notice came a little too late after Monday’s all-clear notice. Many residents such as Jessica Marie say they had already used water Tuesday morning. “Too late for me,” Marie wrote.

Public Works Director Jim McLellan said it isn’t the type of incident that typically requires a boil-water notice as it, “does not necessarily constitute an imminent health hazard unless determined by the (Florida Department of Environmental Protection) district office. We contacted the local DEP office first thing this morning to request their input regarding the issuance of the precautionary boil water notice. Based on their input, the decision to issue the notice was made.”

The boil-water notice is citywide and residents on city water are advised to boil water used for drinking, cooking, making ice, brushing teeth or washing dishes. The notice will remain in effect until a bacteriologial survey shows the water is safe to drink.

“Our water treatment plant experienced a loss of communication with our high-service pump station yesterday evening,” said McLellan. “During that communication blackout, the SCADA system at the pump station defaulted to shutting down the pumps.”

SCADA stands for Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition.

“In our case SCADA is a control system that uses computers, networked data communications and graphical user interfaces to allow for remote monitoring and control of the mechanical systems at the high service pump station,” McLellan said. “With additional investigation this morning, it appears that two things happened.”

First, the city lost communication with the high service pump station, meaning the water treatment plant operators could not remotely observe the station’s operation.

“Second, we believe we experienced a very short duration loss of power at the pump station where the power flickered off then back on very quickly,” McLellan said. “The loss of power seems to have been too short in duration to activate the back-up generator for the pump station but long enough to power down the pumps. Without the communication link and remote monitoring capability, our operators could not see that the pumps were off.”

Staff was dispatched to the high service pump station to manually re-start the pumps and return service to the distribution system.

McLellan said city crews were on site by 8:15 p.m. and the issue was resolved by 9 p.m. after the pumps were manually restarted and water pressure was quickly restored throughout the system. McLellan said appropriate measures will be taken to address what happened to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

For more information, call Lynn Fullington, water treatment plan superintendent, at 941-727-6366.

This story was originally published October 3, 2017 at 11:15 AM with the headline "Bradenton residents told to boil their water."