Wichita’s boil water advisory to last longer than originally estimated, officials say

Wichita’s boil water advisory will continue through Wednesday night, city officials announced at a news conference.

The city has pushed back the timeline on when its boil water advisory will end, saying Wednesday morning that the earliest it could receive the “all clear” is early Thursday morning. City officials had previously said the advisory could be rescinded by as early Wednesday afternoon, depending on tests for bacteria in the water.

The delay is needed because the city took longer than originally expected to collect samples as part of a bacteria test of the water supply, as required by the Kansas Department of Health and Environment. The test takes a minimum of 24 hours, said Alan King, director of public works and utilities.

“It wasn’t completed as early as possible, which puts our schedule then for midnight tonight for us to finally get the results of those tests,” King said.

“It took as late as 11:45 last night,” King said of the sample collections at 180 different locations throughout the city. “The reason why it took longer than expected was we wanted to make sure that all of the samples collected were good and properly collected samples, and it just took us longer. We had to do some flushing of our system in certain areas to accomplish that.”

If the tests show bacteria in the water, it could be several more days before Wichita water can be safely consumed without boiling it first.

“We have a high level of confidence that those (samples) were collected properly, and so we have to wait the 24 hours to see what those results actually are and how KDHE will interpret them,” King said. “We have a meeting scheduled with KDHE at midnight tonight to provide them with the test results so that they can make the decision, and they should be able to make their decision right there in the meeting we’re going to be having with them.”

The boil water advisory applies to the city of Wichita, the city of Andover and other public water supply systems that purchase water from Wichita, including Sedgwick County Rural Water Districts 2 and 3; the cities of Valley Center, Kechi and Rose Hill; and El Paso Water Co. (city of Derby). Those outside customers could have additional delays because they each have to be tested separately.

One 4 square-mile area inside Wichita and Sedgwick County Rural Water District 1 are not under a boil water advisory. The city was able to isolate the water system north of 21st Street to 53rd between Rock and Webb Road in northeastern Wichita, allowing those water customers and Rural Water District 1 customers to draw water from underground water storage reservoirs.

Wichita Mayor Brandon Whipple said he’s confident the city’s water department has handled the situation properly. He urged patience and discouraged hoarding bottled water.

“We talked about this in the past where, really, I’m drinking boiled water,” Whipple said. “Like, you just have to boil your water for a couple minutes, and it’s fine. We’re talking about less than two days worth of a water here. We are just waiting on test results to come back, and there is a specific timeline on those test results.

“So it’s not, I think, to the situation in which people really have to worry about having access to water,” he said. “However, we understand, having gone through this before. We understand — not just with water but with other crises — people do kind of make a rush, whether it’s bottled water or toilet paper or whatever it is, and we just want to encourage people to be courteous of others in our community who also will be purchasing water just in case for the next few days.”

King said Tuesday that maintenance oversight on an 80-year-old filter in the city’s water treatment plant was to blame for the lapse in water quality, which caused cloudy water with “a higher than expected dose of solids” to be discharged into the city’s distribution system.

“Normally, we’re able to catch these glitches that happen. In this particular case, we didn’t get on top of it,” King said at a Tuesday evening press conference.

“Now, the backwash has been completed. The water that’s going into the system is acceptable and is clean, but you have this slug of the water that’s cloudy going through our system, and that’s what KDHE is concerned about.”

King likened the filters to “big swimming pools with sand and charcoal on the bottom of them.” The sand and charcoal is replaced every five or 10 years, he said, but the filter itself is original to the 80-year-old plant.

“Because we have a very old treatment plant, we’ve got to expect problems,” King said.

The Eagle reported in 2019 that an engineering study found 100% of the city’s raw water pipes were in “very poor” condition as of 2017, and the city’s entire water infrastructure was at a “significant risk” of failure.

Construction is underway on Wichita’s new water treatment plant, which King said will likely be completed by the end of 2024 or early 2025.

“That new water treatment plant will replace this plant, and we should have a higher reliable treatment process at that new treatment plant,” he said.

Last October, a major water main break and subsequent boil water advisory left the roughly half a million Kansans who rely on Wichita’s supply without reliable drinking water for 36 hours.

Prior to that, King said the city’s last boil water advisory was in the late 1990s.

This story was originally published June 8, 2022 at 12:06 PM.