Some dry talk about water

Storm Lake residents are faced with the prospect of spending $100 million for a new water plant. Our present operation on Abner Bell Road is at capacity, treating five million gallons a day, more than half of which is used by our meatpacking plants which are the financial backbone of the community.

But that’s not enough. Water conservation has been mandated for Storm Lake homeowners in recent years and the swimming pool at King’s Pointe has been closed on several days in the heat of summer. Several new deep wells have had to be dug to compensate for aquifers up to 1,500 feet deep that are drying up.

A new water treatment plant would be the fifth in Storm Lake’s history.

The original plant was built in 1903, but only 53 houses were connected to it. The water quality was poor and most people either dug their own wells or got it out of the lake, where the quality could be iffy. in 1913 Storm Lake’s first large-scale water treatment plant was located in Sunset Park, at the base of Geneseo Street. We are familiar with that because the Cullen Clan grew up in a house a half block north. Dutch Hausman was the city water superintendent for many years. Dutch, his wife Iona, daughter Mary and their Dalmatian dog lived in an apartment on the second floor of the two-story plant. We knew the Hausmans well because Mary was a good friend of our sister Ann.

In the early days The City Beautiful drew its water from the lake, so that’s where the treatment plant was built. As the city grew the lake shriveled, only to be rescued by periodic dredging over five decades beginning in the 1930s.

From 1935 through 1978, all of Storm Lake’s water was switched to wells and treated at a larger plant on West Fifth Street, where Family Health Center stands today. The old Sunset Park plant sat unused for seven decades until it was finally knocked down in 2009. Some old-timers tried to save it, but the nondescript old red brick box was not historically distinguished.

In the late 1970s, when I was a young newspaper reporter here, city officials realized that as much as half the water treated at the plant was lost to leakage in the water mains coursing throughout the city. They knew how many gallons the plant treated and how many gallons were delivered as measured by customers’ meters. The difference was leaking through pipes as old as a century. A company was hired to deploy television cameras inside the pipes to find the leaks. Repairs were made to staunch the losses, but it was impossible to eliminate them. These iron pipes that run more than five feet under the city have not gotten any younger in the ensuing 50 years. It would be interesting to find out how much leakage there is today. We recently had to replace the water line to our house that has serviced Cayuga Street for more than 100 years.

The current water plant on Abner Bell Road, a couple hundred yards northwest of its predecessor, opened in 1978 and was expanded in 2003. Now we are told that is not sufficient for the future. A $100 million water plant bonded over 40 years would cost Storm Lake residents more than $231 million.

That’s a tall drink of water.