A $61,561 bill was incurred when emergency repairs were made to provide Washington with safe water. At Wednesday’s meeting the Washington City Council approved the bill from Cahoy Pump Service. City Administrator Brent Hinson explained the night of Saturday, November 24, Well 6 had an alarm go off and city staff responded to try to start the well manually, “Obviously we don’t like seeing bills like this, but when we’re in an emergency situation our number one priority is having water flowing into the community and not have to do boil orders, and etc. I think that in the end you guys would thank us for that. If we ever have to do a boil order it’s pretty miserable, so we really try to not let that happen. I think in this particular case Cahoy was fantastic, they turned around very quickly. They worked through our 12-inch snowstorm, they were working that entire time on getting us back up and running in miserable conditions.”

That night when Well 6 went down, that left only Well 5 to provide clean water to the city, and on top of that the south water tower was empty as it was undergoing work. In order to fix the issue as quickly and efficiently as possible while meeting the demand for water, Cahoy Pump Service got Well 7 up and running with a new motor and drop pipe.

The cause of the issue was later determined to be a bad splice in the wiring going to the motor in Well 6, and it is now operable.