Agencies take extra precautions to keep the water supply safe
Isolating workers, stockpiling chemicals among the measures
“Our preliminary research shows that nearly half of water utilities either already have plans to assure essential workers can live on-site at their jobs or are considering developing those plans.”
— David LaFrance, CEO of the American Water Works Association
As the coronavirus pandemic spreads, water agencies across the Bay Area and California are taking unprecedented steps to keep the water flowing that millions of people need for drinking and washing their hands, but which also is critical for fighting fires, serving hospitals, running sewer systems and other vital uses.
The main goal: preventing the workers who run the drinking water treatment plants from getting sick.
“This event is unique,” said Alexander Gordon, emergency services and security manager for the Santa Clara Valley Water District, which provides drinking water to 2 million people in and around San Jose.
“Pipelines didn’t break. Flooding didn’t happen. You have an emergency where people are the problem, in terms of passing potential infection.”
In San Diego County, 10 employees are living in rented
RVs at the massive ocean desalination plant in Carlsbad to avoid all contact with the outside world.
Their food is delivered. They communicate with their families through web video chats. They come into contact with no one except each other. The plant generates 50 million gallons of water a day, about 10% of San Diego’s supply.
That hasn’t happened yet at major Bay Area water agencies. But it remains an option, water managers say.
The Santa Clara Valley Water District and East Bay Mu
nicipal Utility District have cots and military MREs — meals ready to eat — in case their drinking water plant operators need to live at the plants in cloistered safety.
They have stockpiled chemicals like chlorine. They are calling back retirees. And they are not letting anybody into control rooms or anywhere near their operators, treating them like public works Fort Knoxes.
“The control rooms are completely isolated. Only the operators can go in,” said Bhavani Yerrapotu, deputy operating officer of the Santa Clara Valley Water District’s treated water division.
The workers who help run the Hetch Hetchy water system in the Sierra Nevada, which provides drinking water to 2.7 million people in San Francisco, San Mateo, northern Santa Clara and southern Alameda counties, may be asked to live in houses near Cherry Lake, a reservoir in Tuolumne County, to reduce their risk of contracting the disease.
“We aren’t just talking about the operators, but we are also thinking about their families,” said Michael Carlin,
deputy general manager of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission.
A poll done from March 10 to March 16 found that absenteeism was the top coronavirus concern of water utilities in the U.S., with 75% of water industry leaders saying they are anticipating challenges due to illness.
“Our preliminary research shows that nearly half of water utilities either already have plans to assure essential workers can live on-site at their jobs or are considering developing those plans,” said David LaFrance, CEO of the American Water Works Association, an industry group that conducted the poll.
The workers may be at risk. But the drinking water that comes out of taps is safe.
The World Health Organization, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention all have issued statements in recent weeks saying that normal filtering and disinfection already required at drinking water plants with chlorine, ultraviolet light and other methods kill viruses, including the coronavirus, along with bacteria and other pathogens.
“The same treatment processes that protect tap water from other viruses and other harmful organisms also protect against coronavirus,” said Stefan Cajina, a section chief for the State Water Resources Control Board’s Division of Drinking Water, in Richmond. “Chlorine kills viruses very effectively even in small concentrations.”
But the challenge is keeping workers healthy to run those systems.
Cajina said he hasn’t heard of drinking water plants in California where workers have become infected with COVID-19. But as the disease spreads, the risk grows.
Three weeks ago, after an employee at the Santa Clara Valley Water District was hospitalized with COVID-19, several staff members, including CEO Norma Camacho, had to self-quarantine for two weeks. The worker was not employed in the district’s three drinking water plants, but the issue highlighted the risk.
In a worst-case situation, where a water agency had all of its plant operators sick and was running out of chemicals, it could keep the plants running, Cajina said, and issue a “boil water” notice to the public. But he said that is unlikely.
“If we get to that point, you really are looking at the effects we would see from a major earthquake. I really don’t think we are going to get to anything like that,” he said. He noted, however, that if water systems ever reached the point of not being able to handle fundamental operations of providing safe drinking water, “we’d be more concerned first about the smaller systems that don’t have the depth. We are in touch with them daily.” Small water systems that serve a few hundred people can be hooked up to other water systems, or run by the National Guard or military in case of emergencies. In California’s drought, when some ran dry, water was trucked in temporarily to some communities. In Napa, after a 6.0 earthquake wrecked part of the city’s water delivery system in 2014, crews set up stations for residents to drive up with containers and get water until the pipes were fixed. Until modern water treatment standards were put in place 100 years ago, contaminated water regularly caused epidemics of diseases like typhoid, cholera and dysentery that killed thousands of Americans. It still does in some of the world’s poorest countries. “One of the first things you need for a successful civilization is that you can wake up every day and not think about safe drinking
water,” said Jay Lund, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at UC Davis.
“These plants are essential,” he said. “The people who run them know they are essential. They are generally well prepared. But if you are a drinking water regulator, now you need to make sure everybody is doing their job.”
In recent weeks, water agencies around California have activated an organization called Cal-WARN, or California Water Agency Response Network. Just like with a wildfire, when fire departments ask other fire departments to provide firefighters to help battle big blazes, the network allows water agencies to borrow workers from other agencies in emergencies.
So far, workers haven’t been needed.
To reduce the risk they will be, plant operators at major Bay Area water districts are being kept “in reserve.” Some are being deliberately kept home to preserve them in case their co-workers on duty contract COVID-19.
“If we still get people sick, we have a reserve. We have a pretty deep bench that we can draw on,” said Clifford Chan, director of operations and maintenance at
East Bay MUD, which provides drinking water to 1.5 million people in Alameda and Contra Costa counties and has 18 of its 36 plant operators at home.
There are other plans beyond that.
“Should one of our three plants get exposed, in spite of us isolating individual operators, then we could shut down one plant and supply the water flow from another plant,” said Yerrapotu, of Santa Clara Valley Water District. “We’ve not had to go there yet.”
After the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, the major water agencies in the Bay Area connected the pipes of their systems. Those links could come in handy now.
“We saw the need to create sort of a water super highway to be able to exchange water during critical periods,” said Carlin, of SFPUC. “If something happens to somebody’s system, and somebody else has treated water, then we can move it back and forth. It’s really important.”
Buying some bottled water is OK, experts say. But storing large amounts at home is not necessary.
“People should be as prepared as they are for an earthquake,” said Cajina. “But we don’t expect this to reach that level.”