From river to tap: How water finds its way to your faucet

Dave Bries doesn’t mind going unnoticed. In fact, he prefers it that way.

As Olathe’s utilities maintenance division superintendent, Bries is one of several city employees whose job is to make sure water shows up in residents’ faucets without a hitch.

“I guess the positive side about being unnoticed is that people have become so confident that it’s going to be there when they need it that they expect it,” Bries said. “And I think that’s probably just because we have been reliable. It’s, ‘How often is your water interrupted?’ And it’s been uncommon.”

Where does my water come from? Olathe’s water-distribution system contains 550 miles of pipeline and pumps out a maximum of 27 million gallons per day. There are more than 34,000 meters in the system, almost 6,000 of which send electronic signals that allow them to be read by a truck driven at 25 miles per hour. The system thrives on the efficiency of its high-end technology and collaboration among its parts.

Raw water and wastewater come from the Kansas River aquifer and Lake Olathe. That water goes through the collection process, a treatment plant, the distribution system and finally out into the community.

Don Seifert is the municipal services director and compares the operation to the anatomy of the human heart.

“If the treatment plant is the heart, the distribution system is the arteries, from the transition mains down to the streets and the neighborhood level,” Seifert said. “They’re all connected through taps and meters.”

How does my water get to me? Unlike much of Johnson County, which is on the WaterOne system, most Olathe residents’ water comes from the city’s own treatment facilities. There are a few exceptions in Olathe because of development to the north, east and south of the city, meaning that some residents are part of the WaterOne system for part or all of their water services. Gardner, Edgerton and Spring Hill all have their own systems.

For the most part, Olathe’s residents are on one of two treatment facilities: Plant No. 1 and Plant No. 2. Virtually all of the treatment takes place at Plant No. 2, a 36-million-gallon-per-day facility near De Soto because of its proximity to Lake Olathe. Bries said Plant No. 1, which can handle only 4 million gallons per day, hadn’t been used since 2004 because it was expensive. An expansion of Plant No. 2 was completed in 2006 and made it possible for the work to be done out of a single plant.

After the treatment process, water is pumped into town through transmission mains to clearwells, where it’s monitored continuously. During this part of the process, chemical levels remain consistent.

The water then is pumped out to consumers or to one of three storage locations, depending on usage demands. The Black Bob Standpipes are storage towers that hold 6.5 million gallons. The Renner Standpipe holds another 1.5 million gallons and the Hedge Lane Reservoir can manage 6 million gallons.

Those storage units keep an enormous amount of water on hand for Olathe residents at any time of day.

“We’re probably a little more advanced in our distribution system than a lot of the rural systems,” Bries said. “The Spring Hills, the Edgertons haven’t seen the huge growth issues that we’ve seen and haven’t had to respond to those things, but we’re still looking at, ‘How can we do this more efficiently?’”

Depending on location, water is pumped out from the storage units to homes and businesses across Olathe. Bries says the ever-present nature of the water helps keep consumers at ease.

“It’s there until it either doesn’t flow when they turn on the faucet or they turn it on and it looks or smells or tastes funny,” Bries said.

What’s in my water?

How often do customers think about their water?

“They don’t,” said DeWayne McAllister, laboratory supervisor. “If some small town gets a boil order and it turns up in the news, we get phone calls about that. That’s the case where you like to be unnoticed.”

Before the water is sent out to be stored and used, it goes through a purification process. McAllister and six others in the Water and Wastewater Laboratory conduct microbiological tests on all of the city’s water and wastewater through all stages of the process.

Drinking water alone is continually monitored and tested for several dozen contaminants and chemicals, including ammonia, fluoride and chloride. Online analyzers monitor the turbidity (cloudiness) and chlorine inside the storage units 24 hours a day and send the results back to the lab.

Chlorine is added for disinfectant purposes, fluoride for dental reasons and lime to soften the water. Olathe’s drinking water is tested monthly at 128 locations. Most of the testing spots are homes, but a few businesses are mixed in. The homes and businesses agree to take part in the city’s testing project, so city employees go to the locations and take two samples of the water. Every six months, extensive testing is done to make sure each of the 128 locations is representative of the rest of the city. If it changes, the locations can be changed.

Beyond the tests of those locations, raw water and Johnson County river water is tested daily to monitor the water coming into the plant. Storage locations are tested weekly. Perhaps as important as getting water to the consumers, Bries says, is ensuring that it’s properly purified.

“The water-quality testing is really an integral part in getting the water out to the customers, making sure it’s potable water for them to drink,” Bries said. “That’s a critical part of our mission.”

How’s the water used?

Residential properties are the largest consumers of Olathe’s water, using about 75 percent of the supply. That number has evolved as the city has grown.

“I’ve seen it change from 20 years ago,” Bries said. “It’s higher industrial-based now but still relatively low on the industrial demand.”

Water usage is monitored hour-by-hour and compiled month-by-month.

The system goes through peak hours in the morning between 5 and 8 a.m. when residents are waking up and getting ready for their days and again between 5 and 8 in the evening as many people return home from their jobs.

Warm-weather seasons are when water usage skyrockets and the system takes on its largest tests.

“Summertime is when the biggest demands hit us because that’s when everyone’s doing lawn irrigation,” Bries said.

That jump in demand has consequences for the water system. The city deals with approximately 100 main breaks annually, with most of them occurring as a result of high usage during the summer. Seifert said tests during the summer are a good gauge of what sort of shape the system is in.

“It’s like that analogy with the heart: Those peak times are like when you’ve done a 200-meter dash and all of a sudden your heart rate is up to 120 for a little bit of time to meet the peak needs, then it goes back to your normal rate,” Seifert said. “Like on a hot summer day when everybody’s washing, irrigating. Not only that, but within those peak days, you have to meet those peak hours. Just about every utility has to be built around meeting the peak demands as well as meeting base demands, whether it’s water, sewer, electricity, gas, you name it.”

Bries said the storage towers are generally at 90 percent capacity, but can sometimes drop to as low as 75 percent depending on demands.

“During peak hours when everybody comes home at night and turns on their laundry and does everything, it will pull off that storage and drop the storage a little bit,” Bries said. “Then during the night when everybody shuts everything off, we get those filled back up and cycle it through that storage tank.”

At any given time, depending on the demand, the storage units may be receiving or discharging water. An alert goes out to operators if the number drops much below 70 percent because fire-flow demands are of supreme importance. They have to be able to guarantee that even during peak hours of peak days, water pressure will be available for fire control.

Along with monitoring the system, the city must maintain all of the pipes and fire hydrants throughout the system. Bries says the most common water-related call he receives, though, is for cloudy water.

“That’s generally a function of new development increasing pressure in the main,” Bries said. “Calcium deposits can build up in pipes and then get scoured off with the extra pressure. If they just give us a call, we can usually figure out what’s going on pretty easy.”

It’s Bries’ job to make sure your water shows up when you want it to. He doesn’t mind that it generally means going unnoticed.

“From a treatment plant, we’re probably more sophisticated than most plants,” Bries said. “We’ve got a membrane-testing filtration process, which is some of the newer technologies. With the radio-read, we’re ahead of most.”