State Says ‘No Need To Boil Drinking Water Anymore’
By Patric Hedlund
‘Yes,’ is the answer to the first question most people ask regarding the news that it was a field mouse that caused a week of concern and accelerated activity at the Lake of the Woods Mutual Water Company. The question is: ‘Did they see the mouse?’
"Yes," answered Gary Mell, consultant to LOWMWC. Then Mell goes into enthusiastic detail. Please avert your eyes to the next story if you are squeamish. "The tanks drain from the bottom. By the time we drained the tank to about two feet, we saw him floating" Mell said. To the former president of the LOWMWC board, the fact that the little guy was ‘floating’ is significant: "See, if he had been there very long, he would have sunk to the bottom of the tank," Mell said in an interview Thursday, May 10. The reason the hapless rodent’s postmortem condition is relevant is that a week elapsed between the first test May 3 and the discovery of Stuart Little’s cousin in the tank on May 10. A "Safe Water Advisory" was issued after two series of "clean tests" May 9 and 10 from all storage tanks and "representative locations in the distribution system."
Where is the mouse now? "They took pictures of him and sent them to the state," Mell said, then added with a laugh: "Maybe they buried him with a little headstone saying ‘Here Lies Trouble.’"
Mell had asked that chlorinators be added to the system as a precaution last year. They had been installed, and were online, waiting for just such an emergency as occurred May 4 when one of the routine LOWMWC bimonthly water samples came back positive for what is called "total coliform," indicating that there had been biologic contamination of the water supply and distribution system. The "indicator organism" which the McRay Laboratory in Bakersfield tests for is E.coli. There are thousands of varieties of E.coli, which are present in the intestinal tract of humans and all mammals. The type discovered is not the type that caused sickness in several children in Bakersfield at about the same time in a totally unrelated event.
"We are going to start running chlorinators all the time now," Mell said. "This little mouse in 80,000 gallons of water, dispersed through a system that carries 400,000 to 500,000 gallons of water, would never have gotten a bad test in a chlorinated system."
In discussion about how the thirsty mouse followed his nose to his final swim, Mell indicated that the South (#1) tank hatch was re-worked about four to five years ago. A welding bead "left a 3/8 of an inch crack. We had to investigate real hard to find it. It took until now to have a problem." It is a bolted tank "so the mouse can just run right up the bolts," but getting over the top overhang would have been impossible until recently. Mell points out that a permanent ladder was affixed to the tank a few months ago, and the railing may have given the mouse a means to "hoist himself up to the top of the tank," to find his entry with no return.
Continuous updates to this story were provided by The Mountain Enterprise at their online edition. See www.MountainEnterprise.com for day-by-day developments.
This is part of the May 18, 2007 online edition of The Mountain Enterprise.
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