Tigard Water District not notified of contaminated water

For the first time in the city’s history, Tigard-area residents found themselves without water to drink.

The city of Portland’s boil water notice was issued Saturday to more than 130,000 households and businesses in Portland, Tigard, Bull Mountain, Durham, King City, Lake Grove and part of Beaverton after routine water samples from Washington Park’s Reservoir 3 tested positive Friday and Saturday to coliform and E. coli bacteria.

Throughout Saturday, people flocked to area supermarkets to purchase bottled water, and some businesses shut down completely, unable to stay open without access to water.

But while most of the impacted residents got the message, a confusing choice of words left some outside of Tigard’s city limits in the dark.

In a statement released by the Portland Water Bureau, the impacted area included the “Tigard Water Department” but notice was not sent to King City, Durham or the Tigard Water District, a separate water department that serves unincorporated Bull Mountain.

“Frankly, I heard about it on TV,” said Ken Henschel, the chairman of the Tigard Water District Board of Commissioners. “The notice came out to all the media, and people said the city of Tigard was affected, but they did not mention that the cities of Durham, King City or the Tigard Water District were impacted as well.”

Durham, King City and the TWD all purchase their water directly from Tigard, Henschel said.

A map released by the Portland Water Bureau showed the impacted area, including Bull Mountain and Tigard. But information released did not mention the other cities, which left some customers confused.

“Folks in those cities who saw those notices didn’t think that it impacted them,” Henschel said.

While the risk of getting sick from the impacted water was low, Henschel called the incident a teachable moment.

“If you’re going to have issues with notifications, it’s better to have them in a very minor-risk emergency,” he said. “This is an excellent opportunity to improve it and improve our system.”

The TWD serves about 3,500 homes in the Bull Mountain area.

Henschel, a member of the emergency alert system, did receive a call about four hours after he learned of the notice, but said many on Bull Mountain did not receive any notice.

“The notification system needs some work,” he said. “Some neighbors got calls, some didn’t, some got calls at the end on Sunday saying it was over and then said, ‘Wait, what emergency?’”

John Goodrich, Tigard’s utility division manager, said calls went out to about 89 percent of the customers in the Tigard Water Service Area.

“Of course, that means about 11 percent of the people did not receive a notification,” he said. “A lot of times people’s phone numbers change or information in our files change. The point of our reverse 911 (notification system) is to get out to as much of the public as possible.”

The phone numbers used in the notification system are primarily gathered when customers first set up an account for water service, Goodrich said. The main reason people didn’t get calls was because they had since changed their phone numbers.

It took Tigard officials a few hours to confirm the city’s water came from the contaminated reservoir, update its website and notify the public through reverse-911 calls, Goodrich said.

“The longest part was getting people to come in on the weekend,” Goodrich said. “This happened on the weekend during nonbusiness hours, so there were not a lot of people on call. We had to contact them, get them to come in, make changes, update the website and make sure that our water supply was affected by the Washington Park Reservoir.”

Goodrich said homeowners on file in Durham, King City and Bull Mountain did get called.

Goodrich said the response by the city was significantly improved from the last boil water alert the Portland Water Bureau issued in 2009. Tigard made similar calls at that time to inform people the city’s water was not effected.

For the 11 percent of the customers who were not called on Saturday, Goodrich said exposure from local media outlets likely helped spread the word.

Tualatin plans contingency

Although the boil water notice did not impact Tualatin residents, the Tualatin City Council acknowledged that many citizens were left concerned due to unclear communication from the cities of Portland and Tualatin. Councilors discussed the need for Tualatin to develop a “contingency plan for non-emergencies” to reassure residents when proximal incidents did not affect them.

At Monday’s City Council meeting, City Manager Sherilyn Lombos repeated the chronology of Saturday’s warnings. “A repeat test (in Portland) came back positive for E. coli, based in one of their reservoirs, that affected westside distribution,” she said. As a result, residents in specific areas were advised to boil any water intended for human consumption.

“What became clear later on is that in (the city of Portland’s) communication to the media, they were not clear that it would not affect Tualatin,” said Lombos.

Lombos reported that her office was notified by the city of Portland about the E. coli incident at approximately 11:30 a.m. on Saturday, July 21. The Tualatin Valley Water District then notified the Washington County Consolidated Dispatch Center that there was no risk to Tualatin water users. The communication breakdown happened, however, when this information was not immediately posted on the city of Tualatin’s website.

As Mayor Lou Ogden noted at the council meeting, that message did not appear on the city’s website until Sunday morning. When reached for comment, Lombos explained she was out of town at the time, and unable to update the website in a timely manner. Although residents could visit Portland Water Bureau’s website and enter their address to find out if they were included in the boil warning, in Lombos’ opinion, this required residents to be unnecessarily proactive.

Lombos explained this communication issue has since been rectified. In the event of a nearby incident that will not impact Tualatin, there is a larger network of city employees who will now be able to post such information to the city’s website — what Lombos referred to as “increased backup procedures” to produce public information more quickly.

At the council meeting, Ogden emphasized that in the event of actual emergency, such as a health threat to Tualatin residents, there is a “very well documented and well rehearsed emergency command process,” he said, “What we don’t have heretofore is a good response for a false positive.”

In an interview after the City Council meeting, Lombos agreed with the mayor’s assessment. “Had there been an actual threat to Tualatin’s water users, the response protocol would have been more clear-cut,” she said. “We would’ve gone into full-scale emergency mode in how to handle this situation, from a public communication point of view.

“It comes down to how we gather at City Hall and do the tests and communicate that. We would’ve gone through a whole series of tests at our 22 sites in Tualatin. We have a whole list of sensitive businesses that either use a lot of water or depend on water to run their business. It’s labor-intensive when (a public health emergency) happens, we call in people to make personal calls and go down that list.”

There’s a standard operating procedure for what happens, she added. “We do have an afterhours standby protocol, which includes having someone on standby 24/7, 365 days a year (to respond to a public emergency).”

The city is currently working to establish an emergency sign-up list on its website that residents can subscribe to, Lombos said. At Monday’s council meeting, Councilor Ed Truax also reminded residents to sign up with www.flashalert.net for the city of Tualatin, which issue emergency press releases and breaking news from around the city.