BOILING OVER
Hamilton officials hint at possible legal action as Water Works issues another boil advisory
TRENTON >> A former Hamilton Township councilman wants his town to sue Trenton Water Works following the utility’s latest boil water advisory and equipment malfunction.
“I want to see a class-action lawsuit against this facility,” Vinnie Capodanno, a Hamilton Republican, said Friday of TWW. “I’m sick and tired of their excuses.”
Wracked by a recent history of problems, Trenton Water Works experienced an equipment failure on Friday impacting its routine disinfection process and forcing the city to issue a boil-water advisory.
“Please continue to boil your water or use bottled water until you are notified that the water quality is satisfactory,” TWW advised the five-municipality customer base in Trenton, Hamilton, Ewing, Lawrence, and Hopewell Township. “This advisory will remain in effect until repairs are completed and testing shows the water quality to be safe.”
Central pumping station equipment malfunctioned at TWW Friday morning, but the problem “was fixed in about a half-hour,” Mayor Reed Gusciora said Friday afternoon in an interview with The Trentonian. “I am hopeful we can lift the advisory. I am just waiting for the results to come back. We want to give all of our customers the full transparency.”
Boil advisories are issued whenever a public water system experiences problems in chlorination or water treatment. Boiling kills bacteria and other organisms in the water. TWW was expected to lift its boilwater advisory on Saturday pending lab test results.
Capodanno, a former Democrat who served on Hamilton’s governing body from 2000 to 2004, is now running for town council as a Republican aligned with Hamilton’s GOP incumbent Mayor Kelly Yaede, who hopes to win re-election this November.
After Capodanno demanded a class-action lawsuit, Yaede’s office issued a news release Friday afternoon saying she “has asked Hamilton Township’s Municipal Attorney to begin the process of providing her with possible legal actions that the Municipal Government can consider to take against Trenton Water Works and/or the State of New Jersey, which regulates Trenton Water Works and drinking water quality.”
Yaede also sent a letter to Catherine McCabe, commissioner of New Jersey’s Department of Environmental Protection, “requesting that the NJ DEP does its due diligence in investigating” whether there was a causal link between TWW’s chlorination levels and the Legionnaires’ disease outbreak associated with Hamilton’s Alvin E. Gershen senior housing complex.
When informed about Capodanno’s lawsuit threat, Gusciora defended TWW’s public water system.
“I don’t know what he would be suing for,” Gusciora said Friday, adding the boil-water advisory “has demonstrated that the actual system works.”
“The system worked as it is supposed to,” Gusciora said in a separate press statement. “There was an equipment malfunction and TWW detected lower than usual levels of chlorine in the water during the early morning. The issue was addressed within minutes and we notified NJ DEP. DEP wanted us to be precautious and send out the advisory until testing is finished, and we get the green light. We will be keeping everyone informed as we remediate the situation to maintain our full transparency.”
Gusciora had “a couple conversations” with Hamilton’s mayor on Friday, he said, describing those conversations as “cordial.”
“I just told her in the end don’t beat us up too bad; she laughed,” he said of Yaede. “I understand area mayors and the concerns of their residents.” Troubled history Trenton Water Works is a city-owned asset that provides drinking water to the capital city and parts of Ewing, Lawrence, Hamilton and Hopewell townships. The public water system in recent years has come under fire for accruing record levels of water quality violations stemming from staffing shortages and years of mismanagement.
TWW generated 13 violations last year and 11 violations in 2017, the worst performing years on record for the public water system.
Mayor Yaede has been particularly critical of Trenton’s public water system after the city slowly issued a boil water advisory on Jan. 15, 2018, a date when the water became temporarily unsafe to drink under the tenure of thenMayor Eric Jackson.
Gusciora, who took office in July 2018, has vowed to improve the operations and maintenance of TWW, but the utility this year has netted at least eight violations, according to DEP’s Drinking Water Watch database.
TWW experienced an equipment failure earlier this year and then subsequently failed to conduct grab samples of the water supply as required by state law, resulting in two violations of noncompliance. In that incident, the monitoring equipment failed at 12:40 a.m. May 4 and continued for about 17 hours, according to DEP.
TWW treats and delivers potable drinking water as a public utility and therefore is required by the New Jersey Safe Drinking Water Act to conduct continuous monitoring of turbidity for each individual filter site. In other words, Trenton is legally obligated to keep a watchful eye on TWW’s water clarity.
But TWW was so troubled when Gusciora took office that he willingly signed an Administrative Consent Order (ACO) with the state DEP requiring the city to pay a $13,000 fine for not providing documents regarding lead service line replacement.
The cause of Friday’s equipment malfunction is under investigation, but the chlorination snafu resulted from a “mechanical error, not a human error,” Gusciora said. “It is unfortunate, but there are times when glitches happen in any system.”
After overseeing numerous system upgrades, Dr. Shing-Fu Hsueh resigned as Trenton’s water director effective Sept. 13 and was succeeded by interim director Steven Picco.
“Over the course of this last year under Dr. Hsueh,” Gusciora said, “we have made many system upgrades and we continue to make improvements. We strive to deliver a better product and from time to time these things (boilwater advisories) are going to happen. We hope to make them minimal in the future.”