Independent testing finds city water well within regulations

Ethan Hoagland

Sweet Home’s award-winning water is different. To combat a surge of turbidity from the drawdown of Green Peter reservoir into the city’s municipal water source, Foster Lake, Public Works crews had to change the chemistry. A little bit more chlorine was added to help clean the water. Tints from plant tannins persisted through people’s pipes anyway. The change sparked concern among a population unused to noticing the chlorine in their water, let alone a tea-like tint.

To help provide assurance and accuracy, The New Era conducted independent tests of the city’s treated water. It’s important to note, the City of Sweet Home has been using Analytical Lab Group in Eugene to independently test their treated water samples.

The New Era provided samples to Beth Meyers, who runs Waterlab Corp in Salem. To put an early spoiler, the water came back safe and within regulation. But we’ll parse the results and explain the process.

First, on Nov. 29, we met with Sweet Home Utilities Manager Steven Haney at the water treatment plant out on 47th Avenue. There, we tested the amount of chlorine in the water at the very first tap on the distribution line. Our test measured 1.0 mg/L. The max amount allowed in treated water in Oregon is 4.00 mg/L. The city’s chlorine tests, the results of which can be found on the city’s website, detected a maximum level of 1.17mg/L between Nov. 27 and Dec. 3. The average, according to the city, measured at 1.05 mg/L.

Next, we checked to confirm the absence of bacteria in the treated water. For these tests, we collected three samples on Nov. 30. We gathered a sample each from the kitchen tap at the water treatment plant on 47th, a kitchen tap at The New Era office at 1313 Main Street and a kitchen tap at a home on Meadowlark Lane. All three samples were found absent of bacteria by Waterlab Corp.

Meanwhile, city officials gathered and tested five samples from different addresses on Nov. 21, and again on Dec. 5. ALG in Eugene tested the 10 total samples and found them all to be absent of bacteria.

Waterlab Corp also performed a turbidity (cloudiness of the water) test on the sample The New Era collected from Meadowlark Lane on Nov. 30. It measured 0.096 NTU. The City of Sweet Home’s water quality report for Nov. 27 to Dec. 3 shows a high of 0.05 NTU, with an average of 0.04. While our test showed a higher NTU than the city’s max result, Oregon standards require that number be under 0.3, which our sample was.

We first interviewed Beth Myers, lab director at Waterlab Corp, on Friday, Nov. 17. Her reaction when we read her the city’s finished chlorine results of 1.87 mg/L maximum (1.42 mg/L average) for the week of Nov. 6 through Nov. 12 was: “that’s not that high.”

“I mean, I don’t like it,” Myers clarified. To give an idea of how much finished chlorine can be off-putting to a person, Myers used her parents as an example. She explained her parents live near Salem’s water treatment plant, which means the finished chlorine in their water could be higher than those who live farther down the distribution line, since chlorine is a gas that naturally dissipates from water.

“It was, like, unbelievably high. Still is,” Myers said. “Probably like a 2 [mg/L], 1.5 to 2 [mg/L]. It’s horrible, I agree with the people. What I ended up doing, my parents were elderly, I ended up putting one of those, what we call, ‘point-of-use’ on the kitchen tap. A simple carbon filter.”

Point-of-use filters are just that: they go right where a person uses water, like the kitchen sink or shower head. Many of these filters are made to filter out chlorine and other elements in municipal drinking water that may not be hazardous to health, but are a nuisance to taste.

Myers also said Sweet Home residents’ water quality is in good hands.

“You have level three operators, which is a pretty high operator level,” Myers said. “So you have very knowledgeable, schooled operators.” One of those operators, Jaeger Howatt, won “Water Operator of the Year” in 2022 from the Oregon Association of Water Utilities, an independent group.

We also asked Myers to test our samples for minerals that could cause discoloration. Because the turbidity was so low in the sample provided from Meadowlark Lane, Myers noted “there is no purpose to further testing for minerals that would cause discoloration.”

Nonetheless, Sweet Home’s water is different.

“We’ve had such pristine water, and we treat it in such a way, that when this changed so drastically, we really had to throw out the playbook and create a new one,” Public Works Director Greg Springman said on Dec. 7. That playbook appears to be working, as water continues to test within regulations for safe consumption.

Springman said at the last city council meeting in November that he’s preparing for higher turbidity to last through the spring. The game may be different, but the goal is the same: safe drinking water for all 10,000 of Sweet Home’s residents.

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