In a recent interview with APPA, Karen Kelley, Chief Operations Officer at Oregon public power utility Eugene Water and Electric Board, discusses how EWEB is proactively working to improve water resiliency.
“In this job there are several things that can keep a person up at night, and for me one of them is our single source of drinking water, which is the McKenzie River,” Kelley said in a recent episode of APPA’s Public Power Now podcast.
“Earlier in my career, I was part of numerous incidents of investigating and resolving water borne disease outbreaks, as well as assisting water utilities when their single source of drinking water was disrupted or ran dry,” she noted.
“So you can think of contamination, equipment failures, major leaks and drought as some of the causes for these situations. And they were very stressful times for the utility and the customer and unfortunately led the customers to lose their trust in their water provider,” Kelley said.
“I really don't ever want to see EWEB in this kind of situation and like other utilities, we are facing threats to our watershed, including chemical spills, severe storms, wildfires and harmful algal blooms. We need to prepare for those, so investing in water resiliency is a major priority at EWEB.”
A few years ago, the utility “completed critical upgrades to harden our existing Hayden Bridge water filtration plant and make it safer,” she noted.
“Our current focus is building robust water storage facilities, which are part of the backbone of our distribution system. We installed two new tanks at our East 40th Ave. [location] and are now working on building earthquake resilient water storage tanks at College Hill and eventually at Hawkins Hill. In addition, we recently completed a multi-year project to bring emergency water stations fed by wells to the city of Eugene.”
The utility has seven sites that are geographically distributed across the city that will provide emergency water for domestic use following a major disaster such as an earthquake “when our pipeline network may be down. So these wells are not attached to our system.”
They are placed “where you might come and fill up water jugs to take them back for use at home. So this brings me to our largest and most impactful resiliency project in recent history -- establishing a second source of water by building a new water treatment plant on the Willamette River.”
Given that “we only have one water treatment plant and about one to two days of supply in the system during peak usage months, that puts us at high risk should we have a major event such as a critical equipment failure, hazardous material spill into the river, or a natural disaster.”
It also impacts “our operations in that parts of the plant are difficult and even impossible to take offline for maintenance and repair. Some folks have asked me, why don't you just add more storage and what I'd like folks to realize is that additional storage can lead to water quality problems for us. And it's really not an answer. We've got to diversify our water sources -- that's the most important thing we can do at this time to improve our resiliency.”
Kelley was asked if she could provide additional details in terms of the construction timeline and other key elements of the second water treatment plant.
With respect to the project timeline, “we started down this road of planning for a new treatment plant decades ago. As part of this, we considered the alternatives, acquired the site and began sampling water quality.”
Last fall, “we submitted our joint use permit application with the Department of State Lands and Army Corps of Engineers. This is the environmental permitting piece of the project and it's expected to take us about a year or more. We're actively engaged with the City of Springfield Planning Department on the land use process that is also required, which could also take about a year or more.”
The utility is planning to go out for bid on the plant design “in the next month or so and hope to award the job in April or May, but construction won't begin until 2026 at the earliest and will take about three years to complete,” she said.
“We have a highly skilled team assigned to the project that's proven their ability to complete high dollar, high stakes infrastructure projects on time and on budget -- very fortunate to work with these folks.”
By 2029, “we hope to commission the plant and introduce water into the system. But with respect to the key elements of this project, I do want to touch base on what makes this project a little different from others like it -- specifically around our source water quality and treatment components,” Kelley said.
“We are fortunate to live in Western Oregon because the Willamette and the McKenzie are both excellent sources of water both in available water and in water quality. EWEB has been testing water samples from the Willamette River for over 10 years, and the EPA regulates about 66 contaminants, but we choose to test for over 250 to make sure that we're being proactive about any emerging threats,” she noted.
“In all of our sampling, we have not detected any levels of concern in the Willamette for any of the tested contaminants, including pesticides, pharmaceuticals, and PFAS, among many others. PFAS is one that's kind of a hot topic in the water world right now and it stands for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances -- basically compounds that make things non-stick and fireproof. That's what that stands for. So the sources are remarkably similar in parameters that have the greatest impact on taste and odor also because we do have folks who are worried about that.”
The Willamette “has slightly greater swings in organic material, but that can be managed through treatment. And speaking of treatment, the new plant will take advantage of modern equipment and processes to improve on the basic conventional treatment steps of flocculation, sedimentation, filtration, disinfection and corrosion control and we'll add a treatment process called ozonation.”
Ozone adds another layer of safety “to the treatment process and together with granulated active carbon filter caps, can treat the more difficult compounds that traditional treatment processes were never designed for including threats to our watershed that I mentioned earlier and specifically those harmful algal blooms and the PFAS component that I mentioned.”
Those are things that originally treatment plant designers “had not even thought of, so this ozonation is going to take care of that for us. One key point that I also want to make is that this project is not about needing more water, it's about resiliency. We have ample water rights on the McKenzie and capacity at the existing Hayden Bridge water treatment plant. So because the majority of water rights are on the McKenzie, the Hayden Bridge will remain our primary plant.”
The future, though, “with this Willamette Water treatment plant, is that that plant will run continuously to supplement the McKenzie and be ready for a disaster, and also be ready when we need to take it offline for maintenance, so we are looking forward to that.”
She also detailed how EWEB has communicated with customers to explain the need for the second water treatment plant.
