Wednesday, February 20, 2002
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Wednesday, February 20, 2002 |
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County gets water safety warning system By DAVE HAMRICK
If a huge glycol spill comes floating down the Flint River again, the Fayette County Water System will have a warning that something is amiss. County commissioners last week unanimously agreed to spend about $25,000 for equipment to test raw water entering the county's treatment plants on a daily basis. "This would give us the capability of doing daily testing on all of the intake facilities," said commission Chairman Greg Dunn during discussion of the purchase. "If we'd had this piece of equipment, we may have known a little earlier that there was a problem the city of Atlanta didn't tell us about" in the recent deicing spill at Hartsfield Atlanta International Airport, Dunn added. Following the Jan. 3 spill of deicing fluid at Hartsfield, it was 10 days before Fayette residents started noticing a sweet smell and taste to their water and alerted the water system and the state Environmental Protection Division. Airport officials have promised to communicate better with their neighbors in the future, but in the meantime local officials have decided Fayette needs an early warning system. The testing equipment will establish a base level for total organic compounds in the water in Whitewater Creek, Line Creek, Lake Horton and the Flint River at points where the county draws water for treatment. Then, if there's a change in those levels, daily testing will reveal that fact. "It won't tell us what it is," said Dunn. "It will just tell us that something is wrong with the water." Thus alerted, officials can stop drawing water from that source until the problem is resolved. Water system director Tony Parrott said the equipment will be able to show changes in any organic compounds in the water ... "gas, sewage, anything carbon-based," he said. "That's the majority of what you're dealing with" in terms of contaminants, he said, and would have included the glycol that is used in deicing fluid. The only substances that would not show up would be inorganic synthetic chemicals, he said. In the wake of the Hartsfield spill, Clayton County's water system has bought similar equipment, said Parrott.
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