Warm weather starts to burden Altamont’s already taxed water supply

ALTAMONT — With 30 percent of the village’s drinking water supply offline for months now, Altamont Superintendent of Public Works Jeff Moller is urging residents to follow village guidelines when it comes to outdoor water use.

According to Altamont’s latest drinking-water quality report, from 2021,  average demand in the village is about 189,000 gallons per day. Moller said on June 9 that demand is now “pushing” 260,000 gallons per day. 

In February, the village received notice that a Brandle Road wellsite water sample had tested for higher-than-allowable levels of manganese, but by March that number had dropped below the maximum contaminant level permitted by the federal Environmental Protection Agency.

“But you have to average the two together,” Moller told trustees at their April 5 meeting.

On Feb. 23, the village was notified that a Feb. 17 sample from Brandle Road contained 0.59 milligrams of manganese per liter; the maximum contaminant level allowed by the EPA is 0.3 milligrams per liter. The village then resampled on March 8 and found levels were below the maximum level, at 0.28 milligrams per liter.

“It was above the .3 standard,” Moller said of the combined rates. The average of the two samples had been 0.435 milligrams of manganese per liter.

The exposure rate set by the EPA, 0.3 milligrams per liter, is what the agency considers a safe level of lifetime exposure to manganese in drinking water. The “lifetime health advisory value of 0.3 mg/L will protect against concerns of potential neurological effects,” according to the EPA. 

Moller told The Enterprise on Friday that engineers had been at the Brandle Road well site on Monday to take samples. What was different this time around, he said, was that the wells were tested separately, whereas the first time the two wells had combined testing. The engineers are “trying to figure out if it’s just one well or both wells,” Moller said.

The board of trustees last month approved $21,500 for village engineer Barton and Loguidice to work at the Brandle Road site. If the wells end up needing an expensive filtration system, the work will also “serve as the basis for a Preliminary Engineering Report that would position the Village for financing the project through the State Revolving Fund and any opportunity for grant assistance,” according the trustees May 3 motion.

Restrictions 

Moller told the trustees on Thursday the village is currently restricting its water use, per the village code, with even-numbered homes and businesses allowed unlimited outside water use on even-numbered calendar dates from 7 a.m. to 9 a.m., and from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m, and odd-numbered homes and businesses allowed unlimited outside water use on odd-numbered calendar dates during those same two-hour intervals.

“Irrigation by hand, that is the use of a garden hose held in one’s hands, remains unrestricted” from 7 a.m. to 9 a.m., and from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m., seven days a week, according to Altamont’s code.

Moller said on June 9, “With one functioning well right now, it’s pretty imperative that people try to follow this. We’ve never really had problems in the past. We’ve never enforced it. But we can really see our Gun Club [Road] well level dropping...”

Moller said, during the meeting, the small amount of rain that had fallen over the past week had helped replenish the village water supply. But he noted that, during the two previous weekends, “When it’s been nice out and sunny,” the Brandle Road well started up on Friday and ran around the clock until the following Monday or Tuesday “trying to maintain level within our tanks.”

The tanks’ capacity totals total about 1.04 million gallons. 

Moller recently apprised the Albany County Department of Health of the potentially low-water situation, and asked, “If we got in a pinch, what would entail turning [the] Brandle [Road wells] back on to get us out of a jam?”

Moller was told, because the village had been so proactive to begin with, “We can go ahead and turn it on,” he said, and the village would have 30 days to notify the public that it’s using the Brandle Road water. 

Moller told trustees in April approximately 30 percent of the village’s drinking water comes from Brandle Road, so “even with that high [manganese]  number,” it was getting mixed with the remaining 70 percent supply coming from Gun Club Road, so the water sent out to customers didn’t have levels of manganese that were “really that high.” (A March 31 letter to village water customers said, “This is not an emergency. If it had been, you would have been notified within 24 hours.”)

“So hopefully we can avoid that,” Moller said on June 9 of having to restart the Brandle Road wells. “If people follow these restrictions, but it’s up to them.”

Trustee John Scally observed,“It’s a pool-filling time of the year too, isn’t it?”