On December 26 a message was sent to the community stating our water pump was not working and residents should conserve water. The water conservation request was lifted on January 7. Since then, we have received questions about what happened, why the delays in repairs, and what is being done to mitigate the risks of similar situations in the future. These are all reasonable questions, and the CMCC board would like to provide the community with a little more information:

In immediate response to the outage notification, some of our volunteer board members, who are skilled and experienced in operating our water system, began working to diagnose and call in the proper support for what was believed to be the cause of the outage: one pump motor would not operate under a full load.

On December 27, Aquatec supplied CMCC with a technician familiar with our system. In the course of the diagnosis, he found the air relief valve at pump station 2 was stuck. He concurred with with our volunteers that the pump seemed to have failed. At that point, CMCC ordered another pump.

Meanwhile, CMCC continued to troubleshoot other components including the control panel and the communication between components which was not functioning properly.

The following day, Process Solutions came to look at the control panel; they originally installed it and were familiar with it. Our system can be configured in many different ways depending on the requirements for individual water systems. Techs determined it needed to be reconfigured to better accommodate power failures. They reprogrammed it to allow the pumps to start up and fill the tanks properly with no damage to pumps or motors when power is restored after failures. We also still have surge protection. They also found the meter at the well-house was not accurate and error codes were confusing.

All of these diagnostics were meticulous and time consuming, and there were delays in receiving ordered parts. The system was restored to working order by January 7, although more repairs are still needed for long-term repair. Some components are no longer stocked by local suppliers so need to be sourced more widely.

In addition to working to finalize those repairs, the CMCC board is working on planning for future water emergencies, stocking some back-up parts when possible, and we have a spare pump on hand now. More information will be available at our Annual Shareholder Meeting. We hope you will join us then.

Overall, we are grateful for the high level of expertise and quick response time by all technicians that were called in, and for the CMCC volunteers who are skilled and experienced in operating our water system, and who worked tirelessly to rectify a very complicated situation. And we are grateful to you for contributing to the community’s water conservation efforts during a challenging time.

Thank you.