ELLY GRIMM
• Leader & Times
A community’s water supply is incredibly important and recently, the City of Liberal has been taking on a lot of work to help keep Liberal’s water fresh and running.
Most recently, the City of Liberal received the results of the annual water quality report, and Water Department Director Jose Rosales said he and staff are very proud.
“We do water samples every month – we do 20 samples in town and two samples at Arkalon Park, and that's something that goes on the entire year. We also do special samples, we did our lead and copper samples a couple of years ago, and we also do nitrate samples as well as organic/inorganic samples, so there are multiple constant sampling procedures we go through throughout the year through Kansas Department of Health and Environment (KDHE),” Rosales said. “As many people know, Liberal's primary drinking water supply is from the Ogallala Aquifer, and the rock type in that aquifer is unconsolidated sand and gravel. There are 17 wells throughout Liberal, and the community is provided with about 2.5 million gallons of water per day. Since that groundwater supply isn't exposed to air or susceptible to the more direct pollution and contamination compared to rivers and other open reservoirs, it's the highest quality water available to meet the public health demands of water intended for human consumption. In Liberal, as a precaution against bacteria that might be present, the water is chlorinated before sending it to sanitized underground water reservoirs, water towers and homes and businesses in the community, and the Water Department staff very carefully monitors the amount of chlorine and uses the lowest quality necessary in order to protect the safety of the water and keeping it tasting right. KDHE performed a source water assessment as required by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and our scores ended up ranging from 24 to 64, which puts Liberal in the low and moderate susceptibility ranges, and fortunately, none of our assessment areas scored 80 or higher, which is the high susceptibility range. We only just got the report a week or two ago, so it hasn't been too long since we got all the results.”
Rosales said he and his staff were very pleased with the final results of the tests.
“We felt really good about how everything tested out, everything came out about how we wanted to. With the results we got, the water in Liberal is very safe to drink and there's nothing wrong with it,” Rosales said. “Everything in the results looks really good, and there's nothing in the water that's not supposed to be there. The water quality report comes out every year, and we put that out to let the citizens know we've got good quality water. The water quality report pamphlet gets sent to every household in town, so everyone should have received it in the mail by this point. There are also several copies available at City Hall for people to look at if they so choose, and if anyone has any questions or comments or anything, they're more than welcome to visit the Water Department at 1401 E. Pine Ave., and I'll be happy to answer anything. With how the results turned out, we're very pleased with them, and we're very pleased with the quality of the water in Liberal.”
The replacement of several water mains throughout the community has been a hot topic for many years, and Rosales some of that work has been going on.
“We're getting ready to start a big water line project, and it will consist of about seven miles of new water main in different parts of the community, especially where there seem to be more issues with the water lines,” Rosales said. “We know there are areas of town we seem to visit more frequently for main breaks and things like that, so we're going to target those areas now and get them officially taken care of. After this big project, we're tentatively thinking of planning projects every other year or so to replace the old water mains with new water mains, but that's something we'd need to discuss and see how feasible that is. We're pretty excited about the work, that big project should take either one year or two years to get everything done. Discussion about this big project of changing the water mains started in 2020, and it's taken since then to get everything fully situated and approved by the necessary entities and everything. Hopefully here in the next couple of months is when the crews will show up to get started. It's a project that's actually somewhat non-stop, because a lot of our water mains are old, and it's something we need to keep up with, as was mentioned by the former Water Department director and members of the Liberal City Commission. Ideally, we'd have a project every other year or so that's included in the budget that gets done either in house or by outside help, but again, that all depends on the current circumstances.”
Rosales said the community will see many benefits after the work is completed, which he and his staff are excited about.
“One particular benefit everyone will see is a cost savings associated with main breaks, because those cost money to fix, and upgrading everything will also help us save water,” Rosales said. “Another main benefit is people will be getting better water because of the new mains we'll be putting in – there's so much of the infrastructure that's so, so old, and over time, drinking water from what we've got in place can be detrimental to your health. The upgrades should also help with the water pressure overall, because we do get complaints about that from people in town. The current big project with the water mains will take either one year or two years to finish, and the future projects concerning the other infrastructure is something we'll want to get going within the next few years. It's definitely not something that can just get approved and then get started, there has to be available funding and a lot of other preliminary work beforehand.”
Rosales added people in the community should also keep their eye out for a survey.
“Something else we are wanting to do – and we're wanting to do this in the next few weeks – is send out another line survey to the residents. Right now, we're working on finishing our lead service line inventory, which we sent out late last year to figure out what type of pipes people have in their houses, and we're doing that because the EPA is doing a similar survey to figure out how much lead piping is still in the U.S.,” Rosales said. “If people would fill that out, that would greatly help us out, because we currently have more than 7,000 meters we service and we've only done 3,000 meters or so, so we've got quite a ways to still go. The deadline for that is October, so if people can fill that survey out and get those results to us, that would be great. The survey can be found on the City of Liberal Web site, and we've also put together a QR code so they can fill it out on their phones, and it's in English and Spanish.”
Overall, Rosales said, the Water Department will certainly be kept busy.
“Something else we're looking forward to is since we've started doing those water line replacements, it's critical help for our infrastructure, and I know the staff is happy to get all of that started because the upgrades we'll be doing will be beneficial to everyone,” Rosales said.
