The city administrator in Mason City says while good progress is being made at the city’s water treatment plant, water won’t be pumped into homes today. Brent Trout says things are working at the plant, but they want to make sure they aren’t putting contaminated water from five-million gallon storage tanks into the drinking water system.
“(We) made a determine that the water that was in the storage tanks that was compromised from the flood that it would be better not to put that water in the system and this came from lessons learned back from the floods of ’93 in Des Moines,” he says. Trout says they’d rather be cautious.
“We had our concerns referencing possible contaminated water confined to these two tanks that existed next to the plant…We’ve decided to make sure those are no longer a concern…so that is going to end up causing a delay of one day, at least, at this point,” he says. Trout says they are trying their hardest to get drinkable water to Mason City residents as soon as possible.
“We regret this, but we feel it’s in the best interests of the community,” Trout says. With potentially heavy rain in the forecast, they’re trying to build a sandbag dike around the city’s water treatment plant as well as the city’s wastewater treatment plant, which saw the waters of the Winnebago River come within four inches of flooding out the facility.
“That’s on the schedule for today for our city crews…to make sure that if we have a heavy rain again that we’re prepared at a level above where we ended up having our problem (Sunday),” Trout says. Mason City residents who stand in the water lines around town can get three liters of drinking water, for free.