Hundreds of households and businesses in Millheim have been under a boil water advisory for six weeks, but the borough’s council president says the end is in sight.
“The end is definitely on the horizon,” Council President Katie Blume said. “We should have the last of the parts that we need, knock on wood, showing up on Monday. It’s going to take a couple days to get everything installed, a couple days to flush everything and do all the tests that we need. And then we’ll see where we’re at and hopefully we don’t need any more parts or systems. We’re crossing our fingers.”
Borough officials in February discovered “significant” maintenance issues mainly in Millheim’s 30-year-old water plant, but also in its 20-year-old sewer plant, Blume said.
Complicating matters, as one problem was fixed, another would emerge.
“We have old systems and you fix one thing, then you find something else that doesn’t operate right once that first thing’s fixed,” Blume said. “And you’ve just got to go through the line and fix all of these things on these aging systems.”
On Feb. 21, the borough, working with the state Department of Environmental Protection, enacted the boil water advisory for the more than 400 households and businesses served by public water in the Penns Valley town of 850 residents, with a notice saying it would last “at least a few days.”
“Even if our water is just half a percent off of what is required in terms of any levels or anything like that, we need to fix it and be on a boil water order,” Blume said. “We don’t want to play around with people’s drinking water… This is public water, and we need to be as safe as possible.”
Since then, the borough has worked with responsive vendors who have helped to keep costs down, and has new help with oversight of the systems.
Millheim had operated the systems in-house, but is now working with what is known as a “circuit rider,” a company that provides technical assistance and supervision for small, rural water and sewer utilities.
“It just makes it a lot easier for a small municipality like ours when you have a council that doesn’t know how to operate a system to be able to keep an eye on things,” Blume said. “We’ve been very appreciative of our new operating company and engineer and some vendors… With needing parts and wanting to make sure that the folks who were helping us were as responsive as possible, really, we have a really fabulous team in place now that we’re very excited about.”
Throughout the boil water advisory, the borough has worked with Burkholder’s Market and made available at the borough building gallons of water to any residents who need it.
During that time, Blume said, borough officials also have tried to keep open communication with residents about what is happening.
“I mean, we’re all frustrated because we live in this borough, too,” she said. “As we’ve been trying to talk to as many people as possible, especially when folks are coming in for water, everybody is understanding,”
Hopeful that the end of the current repairs and boil water advisory are near, Blume said the borough is also preparing for the future.
In addition to the new assistance with system oversight, Millheim officials are working on planning with the DEP.
“Our sewer computer, even though it was built in the early 2000s, the systems that run it were so analog we couldn’t find the parts. Though it was only built 20 years ago, because of the way that technology has changed, we’ve got to do all these upgrades to make sure we get as much life as possible out of these systems going forward,” Blume said. “We fully intend on planning for the future, and we’ve had great conversations with DEP around that too. DEP has been fabulous to work with.”
