Rusty water has left a mark
Only new wells can ease problem
Medway officials say there are two ways to approach the problem the town is having with its water, which is so heavy with iron that it stains clothing brown.
One is a short-term fix: Flush hydrants and use less water.
The other is a solution that will solve the problem for the long term, say Water Department officials: Replace a deteriorating well on Village Street and build a new well in an industrial park on the Millis-Medway line.
Plans for the permanent remedies are underway, and the new Village Street well should be complete by January, said Mark Flaherty, Medway's water and sewer superintendent.
But while they wait for new wells, residents in about one-third of the town, in the northeast corner near Millis and Holliston, will encounter water that sometimes looks more like tea.
"I have to fill my washing machine a quarter to a third of the way to see if I can actually wash clothes," said Diane Coulter, who lives in the Ellis Farm neighborhood of town. She said she has already ruined a load of white clothes.
One man brought a jar of tea-colored water from his tap to a selectmen's meeting last Monday.
"You could see the sediment after 15 minutes," Selectman Dennis Crowley said later. "The bottom was disgustingly brown."
Coulter's neighbors have long reported occasionally rusty-colored water, but over the past few months, the discoloration has been more consistent.
That's because the town has been forced to rely more on the Oakland Street well, which is known to pump water with a high iron content, due to the collapse of a screen in the Village Street well that reduced its output from 500 to 150 gallons per minute, Flaherty said.
"We always ran the [Oakland] well as little as possible," said Ronald Wilson, a member of the Board of Water and Sewer Commissioners. "We tried to run it just a few hours of the day during the summer."
But now that well is running 20 hours a day, Flaherty said.
To worsen matters, the recent lack of rain exposed more iron in the ground to the air, stirring it up and moving it more readily into the water supply, Flaherty said.
A group of residents attended last week's selectmen's meeting to voice their concerns. The public complaints prompted selectmen to invite the Board of Water and Sewer Commissioners to a joint meeting tomorrow.
The water is safe, but certainly unappealing to drink, Flaherty said. "There is no adverse health effect that I know of. It just doesn't taste nice. It doesn't look nice."
He and Wilson said this is the worst they have seen town water.
Coulter said she has stopped drinking tap water, except when she's brushing her teeth and has forgotten to bring bottled water upstairs to the bathroom.
Her shampoo bottles are tinted red from sitting in the shower, and the plastic parts of her dishwasher have turned brown, she said.
Flaherty said his department is flushing hydrants almost daily and adding compounds to the water to suspend the iron.
He said the department has also given out several cases of Red-Out, a rust-removing product.
The natural decline in water use that comes with summer's end should also help slightly. "It will get better, not good, once the usage slows down," Flaherty said.
But the real solution is to reduce dependence on the Oakland Street well. Drilling of the new Village Street well is almost complete and will be followed by a pump test. Then the state has 120 days to approve the well, Flaherty said.
Meanwhile, the town has been working for about a decade to develop a new well at the industrial park. The hole has been drilled, and pump tests have been done. Now the town is waiting for state approval, which Wilson said is more complicated than for the Village Street well, since construction of the latter merely moves an existing well down the street.
The town has been at this exact point, awaiting state approval for the industrial park well, several times before, Wilson said.
Each time "the rules have changed, and we have to start again," he said.
But if all goes well this time, he anticipates that the well could be running in about a year.
Monday's meeting will begin at 7 p.m. in Sanford Hall at Town Hall. 