Letter removes stigma on city water supply

A great weight has been lifted from the shoulders of City of McCook officials.

Since last summer, residents and visitors have been needlessly concerned about the quality of drinking water produced by home taps and drinking fountains.

That's when our new $12.27 million, state-of-the-art water treatment plant went into operation, removing the impurities that got McCook's water system into trouble with authorities and touched off a search for a new source of water something akin to Homer's Odyssey.

But while the plant has been in operation for months, using 500 tons of salt a month in the process of moving impurities, there was still apparent cause for alarm.

Signs were posted around public sources of drinking water, post cards were mailed and legal notices published, indicating that our water still did not meet standards.

By law, the city was required to provide bottled drinking water to pregnant and nursing mothers and children under six months.

But the stigma was finally removed Monday when the city received notice from the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services Department of Regulation and Licensure -- whew -- that McCook has been released from a drinking water administrative order issued eight years ago, in 1998.

The order was issued because McCook's city water supply was testing about 12 milligrams per liter of water, or 2 milligrams more than allowed by law.

Today, with the plant in full operation, it's down to about 5 mg/L.

While engineers and city officials were at it, however, they wisely chose to treat for two newer contaminants, arsenic, which has been dropped from 11 mg/L to an average of 8, under the 10 mg/L, and uranium, which has dropped from 35 mg/L to 22, with an acceptable limit of 30 mg/L.

So now the notices around the drinking fountains have come down, and, with the coming of cooler weather, the water may be able to settle long enough for the chlorine taste to disappear.

"This has been a long time in the works," McCook Utility Director Jesse Dutcher told McCook City Editor Lorri Sughroue. "It involved a team effort between staff, state officials and engineers to get us here. We're very excited."

"Hopefully we can put this issue behind us and concentrate on other things," Mayor Dennis Berry said.

The water issue isn't entirely over; officials recently discovered that the wrong type of test was being used to measure discharge at the city's wastewater treatment plant.

Once that is resolved, perhaps we really can put the water issue behind us for a while.