Utility being forced to step up its game

The city is nearing the one-year anniversary of a week of winter weather like no other in memory. The high temperatures didn’t top freezing for days on end with the lows dipping to the single digits and to zero on one occasion. And during the frigid mid-February period, two snow storms hit, leaving as much as 15 inches on the ground.

It was one big beautiful mess.

And then the water problems started. First it was just the faucets that seemed to be underperforming. Then calls started coming in. The hospital was having to pump water into its boiler system to keep the heat on, we heard. And sure enough, there was a water tanker backed up to the boiler room, pumping water.

And on and on. People in some parts of town had no water. Others had a little. Big and small institutions alike were pushed to the edge. The casino had to close. UAPB students had to be moved off campus. The hospital had to stop taking patients.

The problem was that the cold temps had frozen pipes and then when they burst and water began leaking, the water system couldn’t keep up, pressures dropped and little to no water was available.

There was nothing beautiful about it. It was just a big mess.

It didn’t take long before the finger turned to the operator of the water system, Liberty Utilities, with the main insinuation being that it had not put enough money into its infrastructure.

Before the crisis passed, the state attorney general’s office and the state Public Service Commission declared that they were going to look into Liberty’s operation to determine what kind of water service it was running.

Before those investigations started, there was the mind-boggling statistic that came to light that described a system in which enormous amounts of water were unaccounted for. Some of that happens to all water companies, but the level of water lost or unaccounted for by Liberty was far and away higher than what is average for a typical water company. The logic, then, was that if the company had paid more attention to limiting those losses, it would have been in a better position to handle such a crisis.

Then there was the fact that part of Liberty’s system was out of order and had been out of order and that that situation exacerbated the crisis.

Liberty claimed that such was not the case, blaming everything on the cold weather, but the state investigators disagreed.

Said Christina L. Baker, a senior staffer in the attorney general’s office: “It is clear that the unavailability of a good portion of the operating capability of Plant 1 was a major factor in the inability of Liberty-Water to respond to and counteract the low-pressure outages which occurred on the systems in Pine Bluff.”

Bingo. Well, of course it was clear.

Liberty and the two state agencies reached a settlement recently with the company promising to take corrective action and make facility improvements on numerous fronts. In short, the company’s feet will be turned toward the fire in terms of being forced to spend more on its infrastructure here in Pine Bluff.

It’s good news for Pine Bluff and those areas nearby that are serviced by Liberty. It’s a shame that it takes two state agencies breathing down Liberty’s neck to forced it to step up and be the kind of water company that it should be. But that’s what happened, and thanks go to the AG’s office and the PSC for stepping in and making things right.

The winter weather was a very rare event. Perhaps, with the new standards that Liberty will have to adhere to, the catastrophic loss of water pressure will be even rarer.