Six ThingsTo Do If Your Water Pipes Freeze

One thing you can predict about Pacific Northwest weather - it will be unusual. A stretch of hot dry weather in summer – unusual. A white Christmas – unusual. A week of temperatures below freezing the week before Thanksgiving – unusual. It would also be unusual to have more than one big winter storm. However, don’t be surprised if there is more winter weather to come. Our phones at KPUD were ringing last week with tales of woe about frozen pipes. It’s time now to think ahead to our next deep freeze. Here are some tips:

Prepare For Freezing Temperatures

1. Learn how to shut off the water supply to your house.
2. Insulate all exposed pipes including outside faucets. Don’t forget pipes in unheated outbuildings, garages and pump houses.
3. Disconnect all garden hoses. Shut off and drain any outdoor water features or irrigation systems.
4. Cover footing and foundations vents. Keep temperatures in the house to at least 55 degrees F.
5. Open cabinet doors to allow heat to reach pipes beneath sinks.
6. In extended cold weather let an indoor faucet drip slightly. Select a faucet that is on an outside wall furthest from the water meter.

IF Your Pipes Freeze

1. Be ready to turn off your water supply if the pipes are cracked a broken.
2. Do not use an open flame on a frozen water pipe.
3. Turn on a faucet that is fed by the frozen pipe so you can tell when it begins to thaw out.
4. Arrange a sheet of tin foil behind the frozen pipe to reflect heat back onto the pipe.
5. Blow hot air evenly onto the pipe using a hair dryer or heat gun. You can also wrap a heating pad around the pipe. Begin thawing close to the open faucet and work backwards.
6. When the faucet begins to drip – check for cracks or small leaks and get them repaired immediately.

Privately owned water system? Read this!

I wrote recently about the Municipal Water Law being upheld by the Washington State Supreme Court. Just looking at the word "municipal" in the title may make you hit delete. But wait. Adjust your radar. Do you have a community drinking water well? Are there 15 or more homes sharing this water source? If so, you have a privately owned water system which has the same water use efficiency requirements as a public water system.

By upholding this law, you as a "group A" water system are responsible for submitting an annual report to the Washington Department of Health by July 1, 2011. Now that I have your attention, don't panic. Your first report will let DOH know that you are working toward compliance with the WUE requirements. Mike Dexel at DOH is there to help you through this process. He's a nice guy, really! He has come up with three things that you need to prepare for your report:

1. Start collecting metered data. You are responsible for reporting on how much water is pumped from your source and how much was consumed. Your well should have a source meter already. Assign someone to record this data! What you probably don't have are meters at individual homes. When you do have those meters they will have to be read and compared to the source meter to make sure that you do not have leaks on the system.
2. Hold a public meeting to establish water efficiency goals. This means getting the people sharing the water source together, maybe in a living room over coffee. If you don't have meters yet, you can establish a goal based on your source meter. ex: "Reduce annual source meter production by 5% by 2015". Giving information to your customers is not a goal . . .that is a conservation measure which is also a requirement.
   
3. Develop a plan to install meters. You will need to explain your plan on you July 1 online report.You need to develop a plan to get every residence metered by January 22, 2017.

There are many ways to get your water conservation goal. EPA sponsored website http://www.epa.gov/WaterSense/ has many tips on water saving appliances and fixtures that will help your community save water.

Visit Washington Department of Health Office of Drinking Water at http://www.doh.wa.gov/ehp/dw/default.htm to find out what will be required from your water system. If you have a privately owned water system, find out your responsibilities today.

Seven Groundwater Facts You Need To Know

Do you know where your water comes from? Pipes? The Puget Sound? Amazingly, I have received these answers more than once and not from little kids either. In Kitsap County we get our drinking water from the sky. Yes, bless these drippy winters because eighty percent of us here in Kitsap use groundwater that is the result of rain percolating through the topsoil into the ground. Here are a bundle of facts about groundwater you need to know.

1. There is not an underground river that we tap into. Our groundwater is stored in between the spaces of rocks and gravel which comprise our aquifers. Picture pouring water into a cup of gravel.
2. We do not get any recharge from snow pack in the Olympic or Cascade Mountains. The water we have falls on our peninsula. What you see is what you get.
3. Groundwater will not recharge through impervious surfaces. We need vegetated areas to allow rainwater to soak into the ground. Native vegetation is the best. Grass can actually cause rainwater to run off similar to a parking lot.
4. Our wells don't all pump water from the same aquifer. Separate glacial events formed our aquifers over hundreds of thousands of years. Some aquifers are shallower than others. Some are even what we call perched aquifers.
5. Most of our wells are artesian. This means they are under the pressure of impermeable confining layers separating our aquifers. Some of this water is under such pressure that it bubbles up to the surface. Think of a spring fed lake.
6. Groundwater feeds our streams. Groundwater is always moving to the surface. How fast depends on the materials it is moving through. You can see groundwater seeping out through cliffs at the beach.
7. Anything that is put onto the ground has the potential of winding up in our water supply. Think about that before applying herbicides to your lawn!

Most of us drink groundwater. Now you know.

Muni Law Confirmed Constitutional

The Washington Supreme Court decided on the side of water utilities by unanimously confirming the constitutionality of the Municipal Water Law on 10-28-10.

In 2003 utilities saw the need for a law that would give utilities more flexibility with water rights in order to plan better for the future. A 1998 ruling had stated that water rights holders must use the water they had rights to or lose them. The legislature enacted the Municipal Water Law that enables water suppliers to retain their rights to the water that their pumps and pipes are capable of delivering not just the water that they are using at the present time. Saving for a rainy day – or dry day – as in this case makes sense. The law removes a lot of uncertainty to municipal water suppliers across the state.

When dealing with water – nothing, however, is simple. Some people have problems with the definition of a municipal water supplier. The law defines a municipal water suppliers as any group A system, that is a water system with 15 or greater connections. Environmental groups, some individuals and several tribes feel that this law encourages sprawl and water speculation. They feel that there will be greater development in the rural area by developers who will have rights to water that would have been allocated elsewhere in the past. They also are concerned with the possibility of individuals selling these water rights at will. This was the basis for the law suit filed in 2006, Lummi Tribe v State.

The municipal water law also stipulates that municipal water suppliers must conserve water. So since all parts of the law has been upheld, all municipal water systems, even those run by a local neighborhood associations must follow the law. This law states that these systems must:

· Provide the department of health with a conservation plan.

· Make conservation goals in a public forum.

· Report the progress of these goals to the department of health.

· Maintain system leakage to below 10%.

· Install water meters on each connection of the system.

This law is good for utility planning and good for water conservation. The legislature has left the door open for further clarification of this law by individual law suits, of which there will likely be plenty. For more info visit http://www.ecy.wa.gov/programs/wr/rights/muni_wtr.html.