On at least the water-related front, the drinking kind, residents in the City of Waukesha have nothing to worry about — in fact, they may be better off.
Dampened by the deluge like everyone else in southeast Wisconsin on Aug. 9-10, the city hasn’t had to deal with concerns about the city’s Lake Michigan water supply, leaving the monitoring and inbound quality control to Milwaukee Water Works.
Completed in 2023, the $286 million system is functioning normally, with no alerts despite regional flooding, the Waukesha Water Utility reported Aug. 13 in an interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
“Our incoming water from the City of Milwaukee is fine and meets all of the standards that we’re expecting, and that the (state) DNR and (federal) EPA enforce,” said Kelly Zylstra, the Waukesha utility’s operations manager.
If there was a problem with the lake water itself, Milwaukee would treat it and keep Waukesha informed of any potential problems either in a phone call, if it was urgent, or an email if it wasn’t. Either way, Waukesha isn’t on the front end of the concern. “We get only treated water,” Zylstra added.
So far, Milwaukee is managing the supply system with no necessary notifications. And, fortunately, Waukesha Water Utility officials haven’t had to field any calls from residents concerned about the lake water supply, though Zylstra acknowledged rumors sometimes spread faster than the city can address them.
The irony is that Waukesha’s water customers have less to worry about than three years ago, aided in part by the utility’s current booster pump station on East Broadway. “Our new booster pump station is in an area not prone to flooding, and that’s always good,” she said.
Plus, some key elements of the now idled groundwater system were close to the Fox River, a potential problem in theory — though Zylstra said those sites did not flood this week. Regardless, the new system is easier to maintain because of its inherent design.
“All our stuff is centralized, and that makes our response time to any kind of potential problem faster, because we can get to the location where all the water is coming in from Milwaukee and expedite any fix that we might have to do,” she said.
Milwaukee’s water utility provides water service to 16 communities in the area. Waukesha’s 36-mile system, a pipeline from the Milwaukee source and a return-flow system using pipelines to the Root River, became the latest after years of planning as the solution to eliminating radium-tainted drinking water, as required under federal standards.
Contact reporter Jim Riccioli at james.riccioli@jrn.com.
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Worried about Waukesha’s water? Don’t be, despite regional flooding, city says
Reporting by Jim Riccioli, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
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