Residents packed a council meeting this week to quiz Altamont officials about the stench and bad taste of city water.
Water complaints from residents and explanations from officials took up more than half of the Oct. 14 meeting. It’s become an annual ritual when summer changes to fall since at least 2020. Officials acknowledged that this year the problem is more noticeable, but offered few solutions.
One resident said that their water has been bad since last week; another said their water has been bad for a month.
The difference? Jason Rippetoe, Commissioner for Public Health and Safety, guessed it’s because of how the water moves through the pipes.
“It’s longer for it to get there. That would be my guess. It’s just how it flows through the system,” said Rippetoe.
Rippetoe said older water lines are not the issue, it’s the source of the water – the reservoir south of Interstate-70 – which has been stirred up recently by heavy rains.
He said this year the pungency is more noticeable because that rainfall at the end of September caused a spike in certain chemical compounds, such as MIB (2-Methylisoborneol). The amount of chemical compounds could get worse depending on fall rains and the amount of runoff. The cold temperatures help, but that will take time, officials said.
“From what we’ve learned from past experiences, we knew where to raise the chemicals and to what levels. Now, we’ve done that right off the bat,” said Sewer Department Superintendent Ryan Spade.
“The very first thing we did was bump our chemicals up, primarily an oxidant we use, potassium permanganate. We use that … in the water from the reservoir and then powder activated carbon … That does a lot of the work for that pond smell.”
It works for the odor, Spade noted, but it doesn’t seem to change the taste.
Because sewer department officials didn’t see the results they wanted, they reached out to the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency (IEPA), Illinois Rural Water Association and other water providers in the area. They learned that the issue is not isolated to Altamont.
“There’s actually a lot of water districts that are dealing with this right now,” said Spade. “Some of them, I mean, this is normal for them. Gotta deal with it every year. Others, one in particular, called us because they were having problems with it.”
Officials are looking at other remedies, one of which is replacing filters.
“That’s on a schedule to be changed periodically,” said Spade. “We might bump that up a little bit and see if that helps.”
It can take up to one month to change a filter, Spade said.
Altamont has an emergency connect with EJ Water, which was put in place six to seven years ago, but it was installed for if there were water pressure issues or the city wasn’t pumping water.
“The meter… you have it down to two inches,” said Spade. “It really wasn’t going to help us that much.”
EJ Water is also a surface water supplier, and blending the water is not an option for the city. “Once you start blending water like that, it gets a little complicated,” said Spade.
The plant can’t flush the water out, either, until they can begin to put clean water into the system.
Altamont resident Kyle Stuemke said poor water quality is a recurring problem in the community.
“It’s not a new problem. It’s just because the lake turned over. It might also be because of that, but this has been ongoing for a while,” said Stuemke. “The discussion’s been had about EJ [Water], and all these other things. People like to throw that around as the end-all be-all fix, and it’s not.”
“Unfortunately, there’s not a silver bullet,” said Spade, who said he’s found that using a filter at home works for him, but that may not work for everyone.
Water treatment plants, like EJ Water and Altamont’s, have to continually upgrade their equipment on an annual basis and as need be, and the city is working on that now.