Western Springs is moving forward with plans to drill a new well to address water discoloration issues in the village, but officials will not retrofit an existing well to use as a backup.
The Village Board decided Monday not to spend the roughly $260,000 it would cost to upgrade Well No. 1 to connect it to its treatment plant.
The board decided in December to move forward with plans to drill a new water well, referred to as Well No. 5, but had also considered retrofitting Well No. 1 for use as a backup until the new well was built. Officials said that would have required temporary upgrades at the water plant to allow it to accept water from Well No. 1, which is chlorinated for drinking but, unlike the village’s other two wells, is not treated through the plant due to high iron content.
Water plant supervisor Erin Duffy said that even if the village went forward with the Well No. 1 option, the well could not meet water demand during high-use times.
Village manager Ingrid Velkme said that, based on the report, the staff recommended the village focus on getting Well No. 5 up and running in 2019.
By running the well through the reverse osmosis and iron reduction process, Duffy said it would reduce production of Well No. 1 from 780 gallons per minute to 400, which would total about a half-million gallons per day. In 2017, Duffy said the average daily demand was 1.72 million gallons a day, with a maximum demand as high as 2.9 million in heavy use times.
“The most we could get with the well No. 1 treatment combined with the other two wells would be about 2.1 million, which would not meet demand in high-use times,” Duffy said. “Even in some off-peak months, we may run into problems meeting daily demands.”
RELATED: Western Springs Village Board OKs new well to address water concerns
RELATED: Discolored water again frustrating Western Springs residents
Duffy said the Water Department has not looked at any other options for Well No. 1, and that even putting water restrictions into place, it still would have problems meeting demands.
Earlier this year, the village applied for a loan from the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency in order to pay for Well No. 5, which is estimated to cost about $3 million and is expected to get approval this summer. A site has been proposed at Field Park along Hillgrove Avenue for the new well, but the village will need to work with the Western Springs Park District, which owns and maintains Field Park, for an exact location, Public Works Director Matt Supert said.
Once the funding option is in place, Supert said the village could bid the project out late this summer and begin work on the well late this year. He said it could take about a year to get the new well up and running.
Supert said decisions will need to be made regarding whether to allow for well drilling 24 hours during the constriction process, which would speed the process along but could cause some noise to adjacent residential areas, or for crews to work during normal business hours, which would delay the completion time and possibly increase the total cost.
Western Springs does not use water pumped in from Lake Michigan, but uses a system of three deep wells that draw from underground aquifers to supply water from residents. Two of those wells, Well No. 3 and Well No. 4, are the two primary used wells, and both are connected to the water treatment plant, according to village officials. Well No. 1 is primarily a backup in case one of the other two is not functioning properly or need to be shut down for maintenance. Well No. 2 was capped more than 20 years ago.
Over the past couple of years, the village has experienced maintenance and mechanical issues with one of the two main wells, which forced them to shut one of them down for some time. The village then was forced to rely on well No. 1, which Supert has indicated has very high iron and hardness levels, and while it passes all quality testing, the iron content has led to much of the water discoloration that residents have complained about for the past couple of years.
David Heitz is a freelance reporter.
