Aging equipment at a water treatment facility caused a multi-day water restriction for people in Medford and surrounding cities this week.
The Robert A. Duff Water Treatment Plant on the Rogue River lost power Tuesday morning. Medford Water general manager Brad Taylor said it was immediately clear that the outage was due to an electrical failure.
“The equipment goes silent,” he said. “There’s not an ability for power to be applied to it, and everything stops.”
An investigation discovered that a single conductor, which Taylor said was more than 10 years old, had short-circuited. Its placement prevented electricity from reaching the plant from either Pacific Power or Medford Water’s backup generator.
“We would not normally think that a wire would fail under these circumstances,” Taylor said. "But equipment is equipment.”
Water use restrictions were issued for people in Medford, Central Point, Eagle Point, Phoenix, Talent, Jacksonville and White City. All non-essential uses, such as lawn irrigation and outdoor washing, were prohibited.
Although Medford Water still had a 26-million-gallon supply from its Big Butte Springs plant, Taylor said the utility wanted to preserve the supply for essential uses, such as drinking water and fire emergencies.
“If we would have had a wildland-type fire like we did back a couple years ago, and there was a high demand needed to try to help suppressing a rural fire event,” Taylor said, “we still had water in the system available.”
The restrictions were lifted Wednesday after the conductor was replaced and the water supply was replenished.
Taylor said the utility plans to conduct additional maintenance at the treatment plant to prevent future outages.
“There’s always more for us to do, but this certainly gives us a reason to even put more effort in that direction as we move forward.”
