BLAINE, Minn. – (Jan. 12, 2017) – On Sunday morning Blaine residents suddenly found their taps had run dry. While a common occurrence in some parts of the world it was an unexpected problem for both residents and Blaine public works. The city ran out of water.
“Basically our water towers drained out, basically we had a loss of water pressure in our system city wide,” said public services manager Robert Therres.
The question remains how did this happen. The city was not out of water, but the water system stopping filling the towers without notice.
“That is still under review…we’re discussing that and we’re still looking at a lot of different things but it’s still under review and the indication is somewhere along the line we had a communication failure,” said Therres.
The water system is supposed to notify on call public works staff if there is any problem with the system. That notification did not happen. Residents started flooding the city with phone calls and the police department activated Blaine’s emergency operations center and started communicating regular updates with residents. As a part of the investigation the Department of Homeland Security was alerted, but at this time it does not appear that any outside influence caused the computer system malfunction.
“When it first started all options were looked at and we do not believe so,” said Therres.
After the water started to flow again in the city residents were asked to observe a boil advisory.
“Because of the towers being drained standard operating procedure is we have to put a boil advisory in place. It’s called a 24 hour boil advisory. It is a boil advisory until testing is done and testing takes 24 hours to do. It’s a culture they have to let sit for 24 hours so by the time we got the test to the labs Sunday about 4 p.m. on Monday the test came back clear,” said Therres.
Many businesses in Blaine were closed for the better part of two days as a result of the water outage and boil advisory. It is unclear at this time if those businesses will receive any compensation for lost of income. Schools in Blaine were also closed on Monday. To see the complete water test report from the Minnesota Department of Health click here.
