Officials on alert to health issues
Local officials said any potential health issues from consuming potentially contaminated water after a massive city of Dayton water main break likely would not be seen until today or tomorrow.
Nearly 45,000 Dayton and Montgomery County water customers remain under a boil water advisory, likely through Saturday.
An earlier advisory affected a larger area, including the entire city, and some of the region’s most critical health institutions. Restaurants and businesses also closed because of the crisis.
“Once you hear that there’s a boil advisory, what you need to do is, first of all, don’t drink your tap water,” said Thomas Krzmarzick, division chief of emergency medicine at Dayton Children’s Hospital. “... For smaller children, you don’t want to bathe them because sometimes they’ll drink the water.”
Anyone who becomes ill as a result of the water situation likely would not develop symptoms for a day or two, said Krzmarzick. Stomach issues would be the most common symptom people may notice, he said.
Most children who fall ill won’t need to see a doctor and will likely feel better within a few days, Krzmarzick also said.
For children who are completely unable to keep food down, or if blood becomes present in their stools, Krzmarzick said those children should be taken to a pediatrician or emergency
department.
If someone is showing signs of illness, they should contact their physician, said Dan Suffoletto, a spokesman for the Dayton & Montgomery County Public Health.
“All we can really say is people should contact their health care provider to help them determine what the problem may be,” he said.
There had been no central reports of public sickness or reports from hospitals of sickness as of about 4 p.m. Thursday.
Testing water,| cleaning ice machines
Sharon Howard, a spokeswoman for Premier Health, said the city of Dayton informed the city’s largest hospital system that it was lifting the boil advisory for its facilities as of 10 a.m. Thursday.
Miami Valley Hospital North in Dayton receives its water from the city of Englewood, so it was already cleared, Howard said.
Premier hospitals intend to clean all the company’s ice machines.
“And as a precautionary measure, the city of Dayton will be performing water testing on site over the next three days,” Howard added.
Elizabeth Long, a spokeswoman for Kettering Health Network, said Montgomery County lifted the boil advisory for the network’s main hospital campuses Thursday morning.
“Montgomery County notified us that the boil advisory has been lifted for Kettering Medical Center ... Grandview Medical Center, Southview Medical Center and Kettering Behavioral Medicine Center,” Long said.
Several of the network’s facilities were still considered under an advisory, however. Long said the company sent out boil advisory maps to its facilities, telling staff to abide by the advisory if they were in still-affected areas.
“We have more than 120 outpatient facilities across the network,” Long noted.
The network told staff: Don’t drink water from faucets. Don’t ingest ice. Hospital plant engineering departments were making bottled water available.
Long could not say in an interview around 11 a.m. how many patients or employees were still under an advisory.
“Patient care was never affected during this,” she said.
Dayton Children’s was not impacted by the water outage, but officials there took precautions when they learned of the water issues Wednesday night.
John Williamson, director of facility engineering for Dayton Children’s, said out of an abundance of caution, hospital officials at first turned off drinking foun- tains and posted signs warning people.
“We wanted to make sure we’re not getting any contaminated water out to our patients,” Williamson said.
Hospitals were not only ones affected
The challenges spread beyond area hospitals. Several restaurants closed because of the emergency.
The problems also caused one of the top area water users to shut down operations.
Cargill Inc. was not operating its Needmore Road facility as a result of the water issues, according to Doug Myers, Cargill Dayton Facility Manager.
“With food safety as a top priority for Cargill, and to comply with the city’s request to limit water usage, we do not have the facility operating at this time,” Myers said in an email Thursday.
“However, our employees and contractors continue to work on site, and we are taking advantage of this time to perform some routine maintenance procedures on our equipment,” Myers added. “We are also working with our customers to establish plans to meet their needs.”
The Cargill Dayton facility, a wet corn mill, uses approximately 3.5 million to 4 million gallons of water daily. It was the city of Dayton’s largest water customer in 2018.
‘We wanted to make sure we’re not getting any contaminated water out to our patients.’
John Williamson Director of facility engineering for Dayton Children’s Hospital