The view from the window of the Plant 3 control room on Federal Road leaves much to be desired. Straight down lie the plant's final effluent filters, the last line of defense for the plant's drinking water before it flows into the "clear well" and then into storage tanks or directly into the distribution system.
The filters are covered with scum.
Since his near-fatal chlorine accident, Ruben Slater has encountered resistance to safety improvements at Water Production.
District 158:Required breathing apparatus? What required breathing apparatus?
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That's not the way it's supposed to be. "It's never happened before," says a plant worker with more than ten years' experience. "The quality of the water has gone down."
Roger Hulbert speaks with satisfaction of the efficiencies he has achieved in the area of chemical treatment. Cost-cutting at the surface-water plants, including the East complex, "has been significant," he says. "We have optimized the dosages of chemicals to treat the water."
Hulbert vigorously denies that the system has been compromised despite a hefty 35 percent cutback. "Our water quality goals are above and beyond what the requirements of the EPA and TNRCC are," he says.
That doesn't mean those goals are always met. In the 12 months since the start of the pilot program and the "optimization," customer complaints about odors, color and sediment have markedly increased.
When a customer calls, the city sends a worker to the residence to check the complaint and test the water. State regulations require that water samples have minimum amounts of residual chlorine; it's chlorine that kills bacteria and otherwise ensures the safety of the water supply. When water tests below the minimum, the problem must be fixed immediately.
The fix is usually simple: The line is flushed by opening a nearby fire hydrant to clear out any stagnant water and get fresh, chlorinated product up to the house. After the flushing, the worker retests the water and notes all the results on a complaint form.
For the most part, the flushing does the trick. If it doesn't, the proper procedure is to go back to the hydrant and flush the line again until a satisfactory test result can be obtained. But city records show that in more than two dozen cases during June and July, follow-up tests still showed substandard results. If residents were notified that a problem still existed that might compromise the safety of their tap water, there was no mention of it on the reports. Instead, the workers seem to have simply gone on their way. "They just said that they had opened [the line] and cleared it out," says Monica Reyes, a Northside resident whose follow-up test showed zero chlorine residual.
Though a little scum, a few hundred extra complaints and a batch of substandard test results aren't enough to draw any sweeping conclusions, other evidence indicates that the city's water quality may be slipping.
Richard Steadman, the superintendent of water and wastewater operations for a Harris County utility district, buys water from the city and redistributes it to the district's customers in the Channelview area. This summer, Steadman says, the quality has taken a dive. "It's not a constant, stable water supply," he says. "We don't know what we're going to get day by day."
Steadman himself has been having to treat the water to get it to pass muster. "Trying to maintain my chlorine residual is the problem," he explains. "We weren't getting any residual at all."
"I want a guaranteed product so I don't have to make changes when I purchase that product," states Steadman. "They are not treating the water satisfactorily at this time."
Public Works Department director Jerry King says that being competitive in the marketplace has its advantages, but not at the expense of more important issues. "The big thing is the service and the quality," King says. "We try to save money and be efficient, but the service still comes first."
King recognizes that a better place to cut than front-line personnel and water treatment would be redundant upper- and midlevel managers, but he also knows -- as well as anyone, given his agency -- the political realities of trying to unload bureaucratic deadwood. But even if the Water Production Branch makes inroads, the pressure to privatize will at the very least carve away bits and pieces of the system. The Southeast plant has been in private hands since the Whitmire administration, and King guesses that the new Northeast plant will also be farmed out. "I think you can say there'll be a gradual trend in that direction," he says.
Choosing between a wobbly, downsized public utility and a private operator where the profit motive supercedes isn't especially inspiring. If those end up being the only options, citizens may well be creating ever-expanding markets for bottled water.
Or else they'll take the attitude of the North Channel Water Authority, which is the governing body over Richard Steadman's utility district. Steadman says he has had a hard time getting the authority to pass along lab reports from the city so he can monitor the situation. "Their feedback is, 'You probably don't want to know the quality of the water.' "
