Environment
Water district asks customers to cut back during plant expansion
When a contractor working on an upgrade to the plant that provides drinking water to the Waccamaw Neck proposed a temporary shutdown in early July to make a critical connection, the Georgetown County Water and Sewer District balked.
The utility traditionally records its peak demand around the Fourth of July.
“It was supposed to happen months ago, before demand got so high,” said Tommie Kennedy, the district’s executive director. “They wanted to do it the week before the Fourth.”
They agreed to postpone the work. It will start at noon today and run through 5 p.m. Friday.
That didn’t take into account the recent heat wave, which boosted demand in recent weeks to the level of the Fourth of July, Kennedy said.
The district is asking its 18,605 customers on the Waccamaw Neck to limit their water use for a few days.
“There will still be water, obviously,” Kennedy said. “We will still be making water. It just won’t be in the volumes that we normally do.”
The water that the district provides to the Waccamaw Neck, which accounts for 70 percent of its total customers, comes from the Waccamaw River near Sandy Island. A water treatment plant off Sandy Island Road just north of Willbrook, produces up to 8 million gallons a day. The district is upgrading that to 10 million gallons.
Work has been completed at the intake in the river. The water goes from there to a wet well before being pumped to the treatment plant. It is the connection from the intake to the wet well that will be completed next week.
Pumps are in place to move the river water to the treatment plant, but they won’t provide the normal volume, Kennedy said.
The district also has storage capacity in above ground tanks and in the aquifer underground. It has also arranged to get water from the neighboring Grand Strand Water and Sewer Authority if needed.
“It’s a belt and suspenders approach,” he said. Asking customers to conserve water “is just the rope that ties it all up.”
The district has received a good response in the past when it conducted similar system maintenance, he said, particularly where homeowners associations were able to help get the word out.
One area where customers can make the biggest impact is in curbing their landscape irrigation.
“If everyone would just turn off their sprinklers for those days,” Kennedy said, they wouldn’t need to make any other changes.
He knows that isn’t likely to happen.
Kennedy recalled years ago that the district found its water pressure was consistently low on Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings. That was when people set their irrigation systems to run.
They tried to get some customers to shift to a Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday schedule based on odd or even house numbers.
“It wasn’t greatly successful,” Kennedy said.
After the connection is made to the new intake, there is still another eight to 10 months of work ahead to expand the treatment plant. It is expected to be completed next June.
