First of all, mark your calendars for September 15th from 3-7pm.  Our annual picnic will be held at Vogt Brothers Park.  More details will be available soon.

Secondly – Steve posted this to our facebook group about water conservation:

Follow up water conservation memo from…

Debra K. Aylsworth, P.E.
Director of Public Works

The biggest water conservation impact resulted from the media push on July 5th where we did see positive results from the request for voluntary water conservation. Since that date water consumption has continued to rise. I believe another external push to request continued voluntary water conservation would be beneficial. If we do not see a significant reduction with this follow up, I will be requesting voluntary conservation be made mandatory.

St. Charles is fortunate to have water system redundancy (Elm Point Water Treatment Plant and Heritage Pump Station) that allows the City to provide a consistent supply of water by either increasing production at Elm Point or increasing pumping from Heritage. However, even that redundancy can be tested during periods of high temperatures and abnormally dry conditions.

If the water system were to incur a failure from being ‘overworked’ (i.e. mechanical pump failure or power outage at Heritage Pump Station or any of the City’s wells; excessive drawdown of groundwater levels impacting well production) the potential exists for large areas of the City to be impacted to the extent there would be little to no water. NO ONE wants that and it would be very hard and take a long period of time for the system to recover from such.

The facts are with this heat and no rain, more people are watering and they are watering more than normal. The lack of rain also increases the time required for groundwater levels to recharge or recover to normal depths after extended periods of pumping form the City’s wells. For those irrigating — individuals and homeowner’s associations — if they reduced the time and amount they irrigate by at least 30%, we estimate the water system would experience something much closer to the City’s normal peak usage of 12 – 13MGD vs. the peak 14.5 – 15 MGD we are presently seeing. A reduction in irrigation or watering to 50% would provide added protection to the City’s water system by:

· Reducing stress on pumps and mechanical components in the water system.
· Allow more time for groundwater level to recharge to normal depths.
· Increase available time to pump and fill the City’s elevated and ground storage tanks.

Water Division staff are closely monitoring the City’s well operations vs. groundwater levels. As the situation dictates he has been adjusting pumping rates to minimize groundwater drawdown effects on well performance.

Additional data that is compelling – in June 2012 we averaged 11.5 MGD. In June 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008 we averaged 8.8, 9.2, 8.7, 8.6 MGD, respectively. So we pumped an average of 2.7 MGD more in June of 2012 than the previous 4 years……that is massive. July 2012 to date has averaged 13.4 MGD with 214.4 million gallons pumped in the first 16 days. The average for July 2011 was 10.5 MGD.

I’ll certainly keep you posted moving forward, as Wednesday and Thursday are looking like scorching hot days.