Cheney water use curtailed

The City of Cheney has enacted a mandatory lawn irrigation water shutdown for residents and businesses. The shutdown went into effect late Thursday afternoon, July 6.

City water resource manager Dan Ferguson said the bearings in Well No. 5’s pump column seized up on June 29. Initially thought to be a quick fix at the top by replacing motor bearings, when the contractor pulled the column apart on July 6 at the Presley Drive well, they found lower bearings along the pump shaft had also seized up.

“This will require removing as much pump piping and shaft as necessary to ensure that the problem has been corrected,” Ferguson said. The length of the shaft runs 630 feet inside the 2,134-foot deep well.

Public Works Director Todd Ableman estimated a “worst case scenario” for the pump to be down of about two weeks, starting Monday, July 10.

irrigation demands during the summer, especially in hot weather, typically reduce the level in the city’s reservoirs, which hold a combined 4.4 million gallons of water. That demand and decline began several weeks ago, and Ferguson said the loss of Well 5 “compounded the problem.”

Ableman said on Friday the reservoir water levels were 11.7 feet, down from Thursday’s 13.3 feet. Tuesday, Ableman said levels had topped 19 feet late Monday night, but dropped to 17.97 feet Tuesday morning.

Ferguson said any levels below 20 feet require the city to take measures to protect the system and bring those back up. Cheney typically institutes a watering schedule, to accomplish this, limiting residential and business watering to specific times and days according to their address.

The city also contacts large water users such as Eastern Washington University and the Cheney Public Schools with requests to restrict their irrigation. Cheney school officials said they were contacted over three weeks ago with a request to cut back irrigation use.

Under current restrictions, Cheney allows irrigation of vegetable gardens and flowers from 8 p.m. – 8 a.m., but residents are asked to use water wisely.

“The more compliance we get the faster we can build up the reservoirs and possibly remove the restriction and allow for limited irrigation use,” Ableman said.

Ferguson added it was important to understand that Salnave Park, along with the nearby elementary school grounds, together with Moos and Sutton parks are all irrigated using water from Well 4, located at Sutton. Well 4 is not part of the clean water system, due to excess turbidity, and is used for irrigation only.

Cheney operates two large wells year-round, No. 1 and 2 located on the campus of Eastern Washington University on Elm Street, but brings on six other wells during the irrigation season, typically May through September. Collectively these eight wells can produce approximately 3,000 gallons per minute, 4.3 million gallons a day, which is pumped through an approximately 40-mile network of distribution mains ranging in size from 2 to 16 inches in diameter.

The last time loss of a well forced the city to impose similar water restrictions was August 2014. Several severe storms that passed through the area and knocked out two wells along State Route 904 west of the city, with reservoir levels dropping to nearly 10 feet.

John McCallum can be reached at [email protected].