Staff Photo “This is an experience that I hope we don’t have to repeat, but as always there’ve been some valuable lessons learned, and we will incorporate those into our operating procedures moving forward,” said Daniel.
Several days of hard freezes left Donaldsonville residents without water, but parish officials say they are working to ensure that does not happen again.
Parish President Kenny Matassa said officials are taking a close look at what happened and putting together a plan to prevent it going forward.
“But anytime Niagara Falls freezes up, we have problems.” Infrastructure Division Director William Daniel said the operators at the water plant noticed that on Tuesday, January 2, the water levels were high and they were losing their reserve.
This was unusual because water consumption typically goes down at night when people use less water.
Daniel said they had to work quickly to get water restored.
“So we were able to get that system pressurized, and we started feeding that.” From there, they began working on getting water to residents.
Daniel said they kept the pressure up while the dialysis center was open, but once it closed for the night, they were able to reduce the pressure and feed water back into the reserves.
The trouble continued as they opened more valves and found more leads in the system.
“This is an experience that I hope we don’t have to repeat, but as always there’ve been some valuable lessons learned, and we will incorporate those into our operating procedures moving forward,” said Daniel.