East Side Water shares plans to make water system more effective

A newly elected board members to the East Side Water System responded Monday morning to recent problems in some of the lines and to recent water outages within the system. He also offered the new board’s plans on making the system more effective.
According to Lee Ray Johnson, the first occasion was caused by an improperly repaired water line. He went on to explain what caused the most recent issue. “There was leakage for a long period of time,” he said. “The customers made a remark, but the previous board didn’t do anything about it. It probably wasn’t that severe, but with time it got worse.”
“We didn’t know until finally somebody told us about it, and we went looking,” he continued. “It was among a lot of brushes and trees. In order for the workers to get to it, they had to pull all that with a backhoe in order to get to the problem.”
Magnifying the problem was the previous board president’s failure to cooperate with the new board that led to the water being cut off to all of the 1,300 customers.
“That night we had one of the board members who called the past president and asked him where the cutoffs were, and he told him he wasn’t going to help us,” Johnson said. “We know where two are at now. We found one last week. Two men went to turn it off and on, but it was so rusty that it could not be broken. It would take very big equipment to turn off that cutoff.”
Johnson also explained what he and the rest of the newly elected board will do to fix the problem with the rusted cutoffs. “We’re going to go get some penetrating oil that cuts rust and apply it for a few days,” he said. “Hopefully that will soften or break down the rust and will allow people to physically turn the cutoffs off and on.”
He then explained other plans to make the system run more effectively which include the use of smart meters. “Later on we hope we can change the meters and put a better meter,” Johnson said. “It will probably take a few months to do the whole thing, but we want to do it right.”
Johnson then asked the customers of the East Side Water System for their patience and understanding. “It’s only been three months, so I’m sure from now on we’re going to find all kind of stuff,” he said. “We’re trying our very best to tell the customers to be with us and to understand there are a lot of things that were done improperly. We’ll have leakage and breakage, but it’ll be under our control.”