The Utah Department of Transportation is currently refining its environmental impact study for the controversial Heber Valley bypass to have a lesser impact on the North Fields where the new highway is planned.

The North Fields is a freshwater wetland area northwest of Heber City’s downtown that has seen agricultural use for generations.

Project Manager Craig Hancock told the Wasatch County Council on Wednesday that UDOT representatives visited the North Fields last month for a site visit with members of the North Fields Irrigation Company, which has controlled farmers’ water use in the area since 1860.

“Some of our team members met with them in the field, spent the morning going over some of the key historical features that they wanted to point out to us, focused primarily around historic ditches,” Hancock said. “We thought it was a very productive meeting, and we’re continuing to coordinate with them.”

Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 requires UDOT to review the adverse effects the Heber Valley bypass could have on historic properties and collaborate with stakeholders to minimize them. 

Despite having infrastructure dating back to 1860, the North Fields Irrigation Company was not invited to participate in the Section 106 analysis for the draft environmental impact statement UDOT published six months ago. The irrigation company identified this as one of 99 deficiencies with the study in a press release published in February. Now, the irrigation company is a Section 106 consulting party for the final environmental impact statement.

Hancock said that UDOT may have had “some incomplete data” about ditches in the North Fields and that the North Fields Irrigation Company plans to share “a more complete map” that UDOT can compare with its own information. 

Time will tell how collaboration with the North Fields Irrigation Company informs UDOT’s engineering and alignment of the bypass. Beyond the ditches’ historical significance, the irrigation company was also concerned that the ditches could become polluted through stormwater runoff from the bypass.

UDOT expects that mitigation measures will prevent any pollutant discharge that would significantly degrade water quality in the area. UDOT will create a mitigation plan that will be reviewed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. However, that plan will not be created until the design stage, after a final decision has been made about the highway’s alignment.

Hancock also reminded the County Council that UDOT is considering a shift in the bypass alignment further east in the North Fields. He added that UDOT recently received additional funding through the Utah Transportation Commission for further analysis, including field work and a traffic analysis.

Numerous local and state elected officials made the request to shift the bypass east in a letter they sent to UDOT in March. The letter, drafted by County Councilor Erik Rowland, argued that a re-alignment closer to U.S. 40 would avoid bisecting existing farmlands, better align with the county’s goals of establishing open space and conservation easements in the North Fields and more effectively prevent groundwater contamination. UDOT in May agreed to consider a re-alignment east.

County Councilor Luke Searle was excited to hear that UDOT is addressing the concerns of local farmers and elected officials.

“It sounds like, based on the letter we wrote, you’re hearing us,” he said. “This process is going in the right direction.”

UDOT will begin mapping wetlands in the North Fields in the next few months, Hancock said. That analysis will inform UDOT’s plan to protect at least 2 acres of wetlands, canals, ditches and perennial streams for every acre impacted, which is 54 in the current alignment. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will approve or deny that plan.

Hancock said he was unsure at this point whether UDOT will delay publishing its final environmental impact statement, which has been expected by the end of the year.

UDOT will begin determining funding sources for the bypass only after the final environmental impact statement is published and a record of decision has been made with the Federal Highway Administration. The current bypass route has an estimated price tag of $760.5 million, but that will likely change with the re-alignment. UDOT representatives have said that costs are bound to increase by the project’s horizon year of 2050.

The post UDOT working to mitigate Heber Valley bypass impacts on North Fields appeared first on Park Record.

Heber City is rethinking an update to its stormwater master plan for the North Village area after discovering planned embankments may pose a risk to human life during a severe and improbable flood.

The North Village Overlay Zone constitutes several developments north of downtown. These include the 8,000-acre community Jordanelle Ridge on the east side of U.S. 40 and The Slope on the west side. The latter, 39-acre development broke ground in April in the North Fields, a freshwater wetland area that has been used as agricultural land for generations.

The stormwater master plan exists in part to protect these developments, which are in the path of stormwater runoff, from debris flows, also called mudslides.

An update to the plan would have included several embankments designed to hold stormwater runoff. 

City engineer Russ Funk said Utah Division of Water Resources representatives indicated that the largest of these embankments, planned for near Coyote Canyon Parkway, would likely be classified as a high hazard dam, and several other embankments would also likely be classified as high hazard — meaning it poses a risk to human life if the dam fails. 

Funk had anticipated the embankments being classified as moderate or low hazard.

High-hazard dams must be engineered to endure the maximum probable flood, the largest flood that could physically occur in the area. Maximum probable floods are astronomically unlikely.

In the North Village, the maximum probable flood would have a discharge of 1,200 cubic feet of water per second.

The embankment near Coyote Canyon Parkway is designed to handle a 100-year flood, a flood with a 1% chance of being equaled or exceeded in a given year. That means the embankment can handle a flood with a discharge of 160 cubic feet of water per second.

“Is (re-engineering and constructing the dam to handle 1,200 cubic feet per second) even feasible without completely cutting out another big, huge section of the mountainside there?” Funk said. “Is there a way to do it? Probably. Is it going to be expensive? More expensive than it would have been if it was moderate.”

North Village developers would build the embankments and be reimbursed by the city, which would own the embankments and be liable if they failed. 

“This is a real risk to the city, putting these dams above the city,” said City Manager Matt Brower. “Santa Clara, Utah, in (2012), had a failure of a dam similar to that. It flooded a third of their historic downtown, causing damage to all those properties within it.”

There is currently no risk to human life in the North Village area because these embankments have not been built.

These embankments were designed in response to public outcry about letting stormwater flow to the North Fields.

Stormwater in the area has historically flowed southwest to the North Fields from higher elevations on hillsides on the east side of U.S. 40. 

“Prior to the valley being developed and farmed … you can see (from) the natural topography (that) when a big storm would come, it would direct water down these natural drainages (and) would make its way through the North Fields to the Provo River,” explained Funk.

The construction of the Timpanogos and Wasatch canals in the late 1800s altered the flow of stormwater runoff, and the construction of U.S. 40 in the next century further changed it. 

That’s why most stormwater runoff does not flow into the North Fields like it once naturally did, Funk explained.

During the two-year process between 2020 and 2022 to develop the first stormwater master plan for the North Village, Funk and city staff pitched the idea of allowing stormwater runoff flow into the North Fields, which received significant public opposition.

That’s because there are two kinds of stormwater runoff, natural and developed, the latter having been polluted by flowing through roads and development. Both types would have been permitted to flow into the North Fields.

The city then devised a plan that separated natural and developed runoff, allowing only natural runoff to flow to the North Fields. 

Both kinds of runoff would first be detained at basins. Developed runoff would be treated and retained. Natural runoff would seep into the ground.

Any natural runoff that did not infiltrate the ground would be released into the North Fields. But that plan also received pushback from the public, Funk said. So, the city came up with the idea to hold the leftover natural runoff in embankments, the high hazard dams in question.

These embankments would be about 25 feet tall and would have significant aesthetic impacts.

The Division of Water Resources has not yet officially classified the hazard levels of the dams. Funk hopes they are ultimately classified as moderate or low hazard. In that case, the city would likely stick with the current plan.

But if any of the dams are high hazard, Funk would like to return to the design that permits leftover natural runoff to flow into the North Fields instead of being retained. 

City councilors did not vote, but all were amenable to the idea because natural runoff has historically flowed to the North Fields, and developed runoff would not be permitted to flow there.

How long it might take to work out the kinks in the North Village stormwater plan is unclear. 

For Franco, the fiasco represented “the cost of doing business” in “sensitive land areas” like the North Fields.

The post Heber City reconsiders stormwater plan in North Village after discovering planned dams may be ‘high-hazard’ appeared first on Park Record.

Central Utah Water Conservancy District Project Manager Chris York told the Heber City Council on Tuesday he learned earlier that day that “all the high water in the Provo River is gone.” 

High water comes from rainfall and snowpack, the accumulation of snow that melts seasonally into bodies of water. The Natural Resources Conservation Service declared this Utah’s “worst winter for snowpack going back to at least 1930” on May 1. 

The lack of high water means 80% of the Provo River’s first class water rights — those prioritized when in drought — can be satisfied. When a similar declaration was made in 2021, it took only four days for that 80% to drop to 60%, according to York.

The Provo River provides the majority of water for local pressurized irrigation, York said, with the rest coming from water stored in Jordanelle Reservoir. 

When flow is low in the Provo River, more and more water used for pressurized irrigation comes from Jordanelle Reservoir, lowering the reservoir water level. Mayor Heidi Franco called that “(not) a pretty sight” last month.

However, York is optimistic that voluntary water conservation by residents will allow Heber City to make it through most of the pressurized irrigation season, which lasts from April 15 to Oct. 15. 

The City Council unanimously approved entering the second phase of its four-phase water shortage plan — voluntary, rather than mandatory, conservation — to ensure the pressurized irrigation season lasts until Sept. 15.

“I have a lot of belief in people, and I think hopefully they’ll rally around the message and understand that there are people who really didn’t have an irrigation season in central and southern Utah. We’re really fortunate that we’re talking about Sept. 15,” York said. “We’re all in this together, and we need to do our part.”

The second phase of the water shortage plan encourages residents to limit lawn watering to three days a week, June through August, and two times a week in April, September and October. Watering should also be avoided between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. and on windy, rainy or snowy days.

The Utah Department of Natural Resources has an interactive map breaking down how often residents of each county should water their lawns on a given week. On the week of June 12 to 18, for example, Wasatch County residents were advised to water their lawns three times a week. Residents with lawns that have low water use grasses should have watered their lawns only twice. That map is available at tinyurl.com/4s4xxr3u.

Heber City also asks residents to conserve water in other ways, like limiting hard surface washing, washing vehicles using a bucket and hose nozzle and covering swimming pools when not in use and lowering the water level by 4 inches below the spill line.

The third phase of the water shortage plan would make the conservation efforts around lawn watering, hard surface washing and swimming pools mandatory.

No phase of the water shortage plan mandates use of culinary water, water that has been treated for human consumption.

However, some neighborhoods of Heber City, like Valley Hills, use culinary water for outdoor uses. Heber City is encouraging residents of those areas, too, to follow these same conservation suggestions.

The goal of the second phase of the water shortage plan is to reduce city-wide water use by 5%. The third phase aims for a 15% reduction or more.

Franco questioned whether the second phase would be enough.

“Sounds to me like we need more than a 5% reduction right now,” she said. 

A 5% reduction would require about one-third of city water users to follow the voluntary conservation suggestions. City engineer Russ Funk explained that a reduction on the same level as the third phase’s goal is possible if even more residents take up the city’s suggestions. 

York added that mandating water conservation can lead residents to sometimes increase their water use, especially if the rules are not properly enforced.

“People think, ‘Oh, boy, I’ve got to get my water.’ It’s the COVID toilet paper and bottled water all over again,” he said.

Public perception of water conservation poses another challenge. When residents see agricultural water use, they often assume farmers are not conserving, York said. 

“But they are cutting back,” he said. “You can’t really cut their wheel line in half, so to speak, so usually, what happens is they extend how many times they get across their field. So, if they’re used to getting across their field once every eight days, maybe now they’re getting across their field once every 10, 12 days.”

A similar conservation process is used for lawn watering at city parks, explained Assistant City Manager Mark Smedley.

“What happens if people don’t understand that those things are happening … they say, ‘Well, the city’s not going to do it. They’re not conserving. Well, it can’t be that important,’” said Funk. “We’ve got to figure out how to educate.”

Some residents, however, are gung-ho to immediately start conserving. 

Resident Tatum Smuin shared some of her ideas about eliminating decorative turf to save water for the Provo River during a public comment.

She also pointed out that it can be difficult for residents to maximize their water conservation when many homeowners’ associations levy fines on homeowners with yellow lawns.

City Councilor Yvonne Barney explained that the city cannot intervene in a private contract between citizens. However, residents can place pressure on their homeowners’ associations to change the rules, given the statewide emergency declaration over drought conditions Gov. Spencer Cox issued last month.

The post Heber City will not mandate water conservation as Provo River lowers appeared first on Park Record.

Heber City is preparing to weather the storm — or rather, lack of it — during the outdoor watering season in light of Gov. Spencer Cox’s issuing of a statewide emergency declaration over drought conditions on Thursday. 

The latest Water Supply Outlook Report by the Natural Resources Conservation Service, released May 1, said this has been Utah’s “worst winter for snowpack going back to at least 1930.” Snowpack — the accumulation of snow, which melts seasonally into bodies of water like reservoirs — provides approximately 95% of the state’s water, according to the Utah Division of Water Resources.

Currently, 22 counties in Utah are in severe drought, with the remaining seven, including Wasatch County, experiencing varying levels of extreme drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. Just over half a percent of Wasatch County’s land area is experiencing extreme drought.

Heber City has been preparing for Cox to make an emergency declaration since the state-federal Drought Response Committee recommended he do so on May 7. 

In preparation for an emergency declaration, the City Council on Tuesday agreed to draft and vote on a resolution to enter into the second phase of the city’s four-stage water shortage plan during its next meeting.

The second phase indicates a moderate water shortage that is expected to last the rest of the pressurized irrigation season, which is April 15 to Oct. 15. 

The city encourages residents to voluntarily conserve water in several ways, including limiting hard surface washing, covering swimming pools when not in use and reducing the water level by four inches below spill line and washing vehicles using a bucket and hose nozzle. 

The city also asks that residents limit lawn watering to three days a week June through August and two times a week in April, May, September and October, and that residents to not water their lawns during rainy, snowy or windy days or between the hours of 10 a.m. and 6 p.m.

The third phase would make mandatory the guidelines around lawn watering, swimming pools and hard surface washing. The fourth phase would create more stringent water conservation mandates.

The full water shortage plan can be found in the agenda materials for the meeting.

Now that Cox has issued a state of emergency due to drought, Heber City could initiate the third phase of its water shortage plan. 

However, Cox’s emergency declaration does not include any statewide water conservation mandates, instead recommending that cities and counties implement their own restriction plans. As such, Heber City would coordinate with Central Utah Water Conservancy District, which includes Wasatch County, and local irrigation companies before entering the third phase, Mayor Heidi Franco explained.

“We have to rely on (the Central Utah Water Conservancy District) and what they tell the irrigation companies about how much is going to be coming through the canals that can be used for outdoor watering,” Franco said. “I’m expecting next month to get a report from (the Central Utah Water Conservancy District), as well as the irrigation companies, on if there would be any cutbacks, you know, 10%, 20%. Who knows if there would be any cutbacks for the outdoor watering levels that we’re used to?”

City engineer Russ Funk meets with representatives from the Central Utah Water Conservancy District on a monthly basis and said the district expects mandatory cuts at some point in the irrigation season.

“Right now, their message is voluntary reduction. Whatever we can save now is going to help us extend the irrigation season later,” he said.

Franco, for one, is eager to enter the third phase and wanted to do so before Cox issued his declaration.

“It’s not going to be a pretty sight when Deer Creek (Reservoir) gets lower or Jordanelle (Reservoir) gets lower. And I’m sure that when we see that happen throughout this summer, depending on moisture, people will be more cautious,” she said.

No phase of Heber City’s water shortage plan requires indoor water conservation. Nonetheless, the city will be including both outdoor and indoor water conservation tips in its newsletter.

Additionally, City Councilor Mike Johnston and Public Works Director Matthew Kennard recommended that residents download the EyeOnWater app, which tracks household water use.

Any cutbacks or mandates on agricultural water use would be issued by water districts or irrigation companies rather than Heber City. 

Agricultural producers can apply for the Utah Department of Agriculture and Food’s Emergency Disaster Relief Loan Program to help cover “disaster-related losses.” The six-month application period opened on Thursday in response to Cox’s drought declaration. 

Johnston expressed some frustration with agricultural water use on Tuesday.

“I don’t want us to save, save, save, cut back, cut back, cut back, and all the farmers don’t,” he said. “It’s kind of tough when you’re saving, and you’re not watering your park strip, and you drive by the billions of gallons being thrown on the hay. It kind of makes you feel stupid.”

City Councilor Yvonne Barney responded that that was no reason for individuals not to do their part in conserving water. She also recommended meeting with local farmers to better understand their water needs. 

She also alluded to the controversial 40,000-acre Stratos data center project in Box Elder County, which since its approval by the Military Installation Development Authority has prompted concern about its proximity to the Great Salt Lake and protests to its water rights applications. It’s still not clear exactly how much water the data center would use.

Barney said that “we may be frustrated” with “huge data centers going in” but that there was “nothing wrong with us being wise nonetheless” about individual water conservation.

The post Heber City encourages water conservation as Gov. Cox issues emergency drought declaration appeared first on Park Record.

Editor’s note: The is the second of an occasional series on domestic water in the Park City area.

Park City water is fully up to snuff when it enters residences. It’s what’s inside the homes that make much of the water residents and visitors use potentially harmful, according to RETEGO Labs President Les Merrill.

“This is an international scale issue,” he said. “There might be 150 million households in the United States. And this is affecting over 90% of them.”

To prevent issues like chemical build-ups that ruin water heaters and hard water that gives bathers rashes, Merrill outfits homes with systems that structure water for each separate purpose it fulfills.

He emphasized there’s no need to fear Park City Municipal’s water and that the city treats it above and beyond the required standards for safe consumption. The issues begin once the water is passed from the city’s distribution system to the consumers.

Beginning this summer, a large portion of Park City’s water will be treated by the new 3Kings Water Treatment Plant, which is already in partial operation to treat water up to stream standards. The water that passes through the plant begins its journey like a Seattle grunge scene — underground.

Michelle De Haan, the water quality and treatment manager for Park City, explained that the plant is fed through two main sources — Spiro Tunnel and Judge Tunnel.

“When the miners started drilling or zinc and silver predominantly, they’d get flooded by the water that was in the back of the mines,” De Haan said. “They created these drain tunnels to actually move the water to a place where they could discharge it, and then they became the first drinking water.”

Part of the project was to reinforce the tunnel, which ended up costing $4.6 million of the project’s projected $110 million.

“We’ve predominantly been doing this so that we can make sure the water keeps flowing,” De Haan explained. “Also because of air quality.” 

She walked a few hundred feet beyond the mouth of the Spiro Tunnel, far enough that the sound of water reverberated around the stone walls like an enclosed river. Then she pointed to what was effectively an enclosed river. It ran through a black, lightless tunnel up to the edge of the platform where she stood, flowing with an orangish hue.

A narrow plank of wood serves as a catwalk above the water, and De Haan said the underground river is maintained for about three miles before a dam works to regulate the flow.

While both sources are directed towards the plant, water is left in the underground flow for golf course irrigation, McLeod Creek and artificial snow.

“Vail uses Spiro tunnel water for snowmaking,” she said. “They actually have about a third of the water rights.”

Though miners in the times before the Environmental Protection Agency probably didn’t think twice before they dipped their tin cups in the drainage route for a nice swig, the water’s hue indicates there’s a lot more there than just water in there. Namely, it’s contaminated with antimony, arsenic, iron, manganese, cadmium, zink, thallium and lead.

Ten years ago, the state of Utah issued permits to Park City with a compliance order to treat all Judge Tunnel water and a portion of Spiro Tunnel water by Jan. 1 of this year. De Haan and other city staff members had to not only meet drinking water requirements, but also stipulations set by the Utah Division of Water Quality for water pumped into streams. 

“The 3 Kings plant was designed to remove metals for creek quality standards,” De Haan said. 

Interestingly, she added, creek quality standards are more stringent. For example, while it’s considered safe to drink two micrograms of thallium per liter of water, creek water can only have 0.24 micrograms per liter.

“A lot of the fish and aquatic life are actually more sensitive, to metals specifically, to humans,” she said.

Down the hill from the entrance to Spiro Tunnel, all eight of the 3Kings treatment facility buildings sit on just under two acres, a space limitation De Haan said posed the largest hurdle for the project.

Someone who drives past the complex isn’t likely to surmise what it is. The building exteriors are a combination of stone and textured wood and closely match the surrounding Silver Star Resort houses. Water flows from building to building underground. The pipes are almost entirely out of view to outside observers.

But once inside the buildings, it’s clear they’re not condos.

Before being treated, the water is first pumped into a mix from the two sources. In what De Haan said is the oxidation and sedimentation area, its acidity is slightly decreased, and contaminates are coagulated to form into larger and larger pieces. They floated around in the tanks like backwash in a toddler’s cup.

“As we come in, we’re working toward reduction of the metals, and we change the chemistry by increasing the pH here. We actually change the pH of the water three times,” she said.

The product water is flushed over a set of traps that allow the liquid to pass through while they catch solid contaminates.

According to De Haan, 3Kings doesn’t discharge any of its waste to the sewer. Instead, the trapped sediment is pumped to nearby tanks designed to be reminiscent of early mining water tanks still scattered throughout the mountains around Park City.

From there, the waste metal is passed to a final building, where thick sludge is subjected to pressure that “creates a very dry cake.”

“That’s the end product. … It all goes to the landfill,” she said.

While its pollutants are prepared for disposal after its prefiltration process, the drained water continues to large pressure filters.

“The filter media is a specialty filter media, it’s called manganese dioxide, and the reason for that is that metals absorb onto that material, like thallium and manganese,” De Haan said. “These filters are also doing things like filtering out any remaining lead and arsenic that were partially removed upstream.”

Another set of filters uses titanium dioxide to remove antimony, and the water is ready to be sent out into the stream. The portion intended for drinking is further disinfected with UV lights to kill any potential pathogens, chlorinated so it remains safe throughout the city’s distribution lines, and is then ready to distribute. Though the last steps aren’t technically necessary because the treated water was groundwater rather than surface water, De Haan explained it’s just another barrier in place.

From there, the water is combined with water treated at Quinns Junction Water Treatment Plant and the Creekside Water Treatment Plant and dispersed throughout Park City.

As simple as the treatment plant’s recipe for water may sound, it wasn’t something Park City found in any cookbook.

“Thallium is a unique water that is in our source waters that the stream water is really low. And we had to remove it for drinking water purposes back in the time when we had the Spiro Water Treatment Plant in place, but not at the same kind of concentrations,” De Haan said. “The drinking water standard is two micrograms per liter. The stream standard is 0.24 micrograms per liter. … What we had to learn was that if you oxidize the special manganese dioxide media with chlorine, you will absorb that metal onto the media and that’s how it’s removed.”

That process was discovered specifically for 3Kings.

Removing antimony with titanium dioxide, she added, is another unique feature. Though it’s widely used to remove arsenic, it’s only used to filter antimony at one other plant in the country: Alta, another town that pulls its water from an old mine tunnel.

“It’s all about mine tunnel sources being unique drinking water sources. There aren’t very many of us in the country who are treating mine tunnel sources,” De Haan said. “There’s a lot of water systems in the country that are removing things like arsenic. There are a lot of water systems that are removing iron and manganese from the water, and we all know how to do that well. What is not common is to have all these different metals in the same source waters so that you have to use multiple technologies to remove them all.”

On a much broader level, De Haan’s explanation of water treatment at a city level mirrored what Merrill says about how each home should filter and treat its water — it’s entirely dependent on the situation.

While De Haan considers the specific contaminates the city’s water holds before it is treated, Merrill watches for the smaller, often less significant differences after it has already been drained, filtered, exposed to UV lights and chlorinated. How hard is the water, and how will it react with peoples’ skin when they use it to wash? Will peoples’ water filters or softeners ruin the balance the city has so meticulously earned? Will it corrode and eventually destroy water heaters?

While those questions might seem relatively inconsequential compared to the consequences 3Kings would face if it didn’t properly fulfill its intended purpose later this year — did we miss enough arsenic to kill someone? Will people start to lose their hair and vomit because there’s too much thallium? Is the whole town simultaneously going to come down with an intense case of diarrhea? — Merrill argues that it makes enough of a difference inside homes to matter.

Tomilee Tilley, a 15-year Park City resident who hired Merrill to test and treat her water, would agree.

“I met Les when I was building my third home on Woodside,” she said.

Before then, she sent water samples to out-of-state labs to find they contained a lot of minerals, including sulfate.

“When I started building this house, I started researching various companies to see what they did different,” she said.

Beyond companies selling salt-based water softeners, she had no luck. She took this as bad news, in part because her home design included a 50-foot water wall cascading down a sheet of glass. Soon after construction, the feature frequently failed to work correctly.

When Merrill entered the picture, he came to her to test her water that same day. He recommended a system that would provide perfectly clean water for the waterfall, and the problems disappeared.

She noticed improvements in her hair and less deterioration of her faucets. Happy with his work, she sent Merrill to her daughter’s house to test her water because her grandkids’ were breaking out in rashes.

“The rashes were gone after he redid their water system,” she said.

Another issue Merrill tackles is the growth of bacteria in homes left vacant for significant amounts of time, not uncommon in Park City’s havens of second homes and vacation rentals. With the pandemic, water sat docile in pipes for years in some cases.

De Haan agreed this can be problematic, and she said people can find instructions on how to properly flush out their homes’ pipes on Park City’s website.

De Haan also encouraged people to maintain their at-home water systems.

The post Park City water is well treated to the home; after that, problems arise appeared first on Park Record.

Editor’s note: This is the first of an occasional series on challenges with domestic water in and around Park City.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, RETEGO Labs President Les Merrill stepped into his Bountiful basement to find his floor submerged in a few inches of water.  

Merrill, who’s made a career in detecting corrosion in water throughout the world and building large scale infrastructure systems for over 40 years, initially thought the blame for the problem could lie on the shoulders of the city.

“Every two years this water heater would go out,” he remembered. “I was mad. I was mad at the city. What is the city of Bountiful doing to my water to make it this bad? What’s going on?”

Merril had only limited things to do given the isolating nature of the pandemic. He also happened to have what he estimated to be about $5 million of testing equipment in his basement, instruments he and his partner had developed and prepared to put on the market in March and April 2020 — just in time for everything to change.

“All of those conferences we were going to go to, everything we were working on, just came to a dead stop,” he said.

He decided to test his water as where it entered his house and as it left his water heater five times every day at different times for a month.

“I had all the technology. I had all the pieces and parts,” he said. “I came up with what was probably the best study of water quality in a home ever done.”

What he found made him realize the water coming into his home from Bountiful’s system was not to blame for the string of broken water heaters in his basement. Rather, he said it met each federal and state guideline.

The problem came from inside the house.

After the city’s standard-meeting water passed through his softener, he said it became “intolerably corrosive.

“The water heater didn’t stand a chance,” he said. 

Rather than replacing the heater for the fifth time under warranty, he found ways to treat his water and noted magnificent differences.

“Then we went on and did a few other things for some water heater companies that were having problems up in Park City with stainless steel water heaters going out in six months or a year,” he said. “We found the correlation with microbially induced corrosion, MIC, and another compound called sulfate-reducing bacteria.”

He also found sulfate reducing bacteria, something he had commonly seen while treating water in oil fields.

“We found it all over inside of the homes of Park City,” he said.

Yet, similar to his personal experience in Bountiful, the issue did not originate or even exist within the city’s distribution system. 

Though Park City and Bountiful supply their water from different sources, the overarching issue in both locations was similar — the cities appropriately treat water in their systems and make it safe to enter people’s homes. But their treatment systems in their homes, through one process or another, then distort the quality.

Merrill has since reached out to professionals beyond his own company.

“This is an international scale issue,” he said. “There might be 150 million households in the United States. And this is affecting over 90% of them.”

In Park City, he found that one woman’s illness was caused by her homes’ copper pipes. Sulfate levels prevent softeners from being very effective, and because the community is rife with second homes and vacation rentals that often sit unused for periods of time, he’s found other issues involving water that sits stagnant in pipes, he said.

The difficulties he’s faced notifying communities of the problem comes through the fact that each need is different, and there aren’t any one-size-fits-all solutions.

Would homes be better off if they removed their soft water heaters?

“It depends,” he said.

“In Park City, you can be on the municipal water. It’s good. It meets all the criteria just like Bountiful does. It is right in the middle between scale and corrosion because of the way they balance it and watch it. But it’s very hard, so you do have to soften it or you’re going to have a lot of issues with your clothes and your hair and your skin and just everything,” he said. “But it’s not just calcium and magnesium which are the standard hardness elements.”

Yet, while different states and even different towns and cities within those states have different water treatment needs, it receives the same or similar treatment.

Future stories will delve into specific issues that are leaving people with low quality or even harmful water in their homes, which areas of Park City face what risks, developers who have taken unique approaches to water treatment, and how testing individual homes can lead create plans that will provide them with the best water.

The post Bad water in the home doesn’t mean it was that way coming in appeared first on Park Record.

Recycle Utah hosted their annual Water Festival at St. Mary’s Catholic Church Thursday morning, April 27, 2017. Fourth grade students from across the county spent the day learning about the importance of water, how we can keep it clean and how we all use it in our everyday lives. (Tanzi Propst/Park Record)

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