U.S. Water News Online
DES MOINES, Iowa -- Restoring drinkable water to a city the size of New Orleans could take months given the damage caused by Hurricane Katrina, said L.D. McMullen, who restored water to Des Moines after extensive flooding in 1993.
McMullen, general manager of the Des Moines Water Works, was responsible for getting water to 350,000 customers after the flooded Raccoon River broke through a levee protecting the water plant.
Des Moines residents awakened on July 11, 1993, to find the city water treatment plant had flooded and shut down at about 3 a.m. that morning.
Their lives would be disrupted for nearly three weeks as water officials struggled to clean up and restore the water system. In the interim, the Iowa National Guard trucked in tanks of water.
At the time, Des Moines was the largest city that had experienced complete water system failure.
McMullen said he has talked with the Washington-based Association of Metropolitan Water Agencies, which is helping hurricane-damaged cities plan to restore safe drinking water to residents.
"Based off my experience and what I've seen there, I think they're in for a long haul," McMullen said.
He said it took his workers two days to get the floodwater out of the treatment plant, but expects that process could take a month or longer in New Orleans.
The next step, restoring reliable power to the large pumps that move the water through pipelines, took about a week during the Des Moines flood because two nearby power substations had been knocked offline.
McMullen said the New Orleans power grid appears to have significant damage and will likely take longer than a week to restore once floodwaters recede.
Once the water works plant is running again, significant measures must be taken to clean the entire distribution system
The Des Moines system has 1,000 miles of pipes that had to be flushed and disinfected.
"We had teams all over he city flushing fire hydrants and anything that we could get a lot of water out of," McMullen said. "We fed a lot of chlorine into the water system to the point that it would kill any bugs in the pipeline."
After about three days of flushing the system with chlorine, they went to damaged homes to shut off broken pipes so water wouldn't continue pumping out of the system.
"That is probably the most difficult, getting all contaminated water flushed out from the homes and isolating homes that had broken pipes," he said. "We had teams of plumbers that went in and turned off water to the point that people could clean up their own systems."
That process took another week.
McMullen set up banks of phones with plumbers answering questions and telling people how to flush out their home pipes and make necessary repairs.
"Overall, it took us 19 days to get the water back to drinking water quality throughout all the homes," he said.
The immediate challenge in New Orleans will be getting clean water to residents while the system is down. Soft drink companies and even breweries bottled water during the Des Moines flood, but many of the bottles wound up stacked in a warehouse, McMullen said.
The most successful delivery system were the tankers of clean water brought by National Guard members to neighborhood grocery stores, where residents filled their own containers.
"In a very short term, bottled water didn't work," he said.
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