State officials have asked Montpelier city officials to significantly revise a city-commissioned report that was intended to outline solutions for the city’s chronic drinking water problems.
Montpelier has long suffered from an unusually high number of water main breaks, caused by its old pipes, corrosive soils and unusually high water pressure. The problem has prompted frequent boil-water notices and water stoppages that have impacted residents and closed businesses and schools.
To address the problems, the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation, which regulates municipal drinking water systems, required the city to hire engineers to study and report how the city could reduce its water pressure.
Montpelier officials hired the Dufresne Group, which conducted and wrote the analysis, and delivered it to state officials earlier this year. It recommended that the city continue with its current plan: slowly but steadily replacing drinking water pipes — without reducing water pressure.
In written comments to city officials last week, Allison Murphy, engineer for the state’s Division of Drinking Water and Groundwater Protection, called that analysis incomplete.
More than half of the pipe network maintains water pressures that hover between 150 pounds per square inch and 200 psi, while the state recommends pressures between 60 and 90 psi at the highest.
Montpelier’s water source, Berlin Pond, is located several hundred feet above the city. The system is designed to maintain high pressures as water flows downhill from Berlin Pond, travels through downtown, then climbs hills on the city’s far side. The system serves a population of nearly 9,000 people.
Reducing pressure in the city’s main zone would require “significant capital investment” in new infrastructure, land acquisition and management of high-elevation connections, the city’s report states. Among other measures, that could include booster stations or drilled wells.
Murphy wrote that the course of action recommended by the report, called Alternative 3, “is equivalent to the ‘Do-Nothing’ Alternative” and does not meet the requirements of the city’s permit.
She said the selection of Alternative 3 was made with “inadequate technical justification and support,” and that it does not capture the costs associated with the city’s high water pressure, including those borne by users.
Under the current levels of psi, residents and property owners may need to use higher-class pipes that can withstand the pressure, buy additional pressure-reducing valves for their homes and, in some instances, withstand damage, she wrote.
For example, last summer, a water main break caused a wave of pressure to blow through a valve on an apartment building, which sent the torrent through the building’s old pipes. They collapsed. The landlord paid for the fixes to the building.
The state’s letter to the city includes an attachment with 52 comments that ask for more specificity and point to errors in the report. For example, Murphy asks whether the report’s authors tested soils to see if they are, in fact, corrosive and causing pipes to break prematurely, as often suggested by city officials.
City officials and the Dufresne Group must respond to the state’s assessment and all of its comments. Neither Kurt Motyka, director of Montpelier’s Department of Public Works, nor Murphy were available for comment on Monday.
