Councilors Dan Allie, Michael Burns, and Mary Ann Babinski.
(Photo by Peter Currier)
WESTFIELD- The City Council Public Health and Safety Committee received a report from Department of Public Works Director David Billips on the city’s water supply Wednesday evening in city hall.
Billips opened up by saying the city’s reservoir was ‘more than full’. He added that the wells seven and eight treatment plant is expected to be up and running by early summer if not sooner.
“The East Mountain water tank is still in design,” said Billips, “we were at 90 percent a couple months ago. So, we’re expecting a meeting for the complete design and we’ll go out to bid sometime this year.”
Billips also handed out a timeline regarding the status of the temporary treatment being done to well two. He said that the well was tested on October 24th of last year and showed no contamination or breakthrough when the test results were received on November 13th. The same non-detection results came back after the water was tested again on December 20th and January 17th. Billips said the department is awaiting results from tests taken on February 5th.
“We’re testing so that when we get the results back, we test again,” said Billips, “it’s a lot more than we’re required to test, but we’re going to do that until we can develop a baseline when seven and eight come up.”
Billips said that there will be a video posted on the city’s website by the end of the week that will explain the process they went through. He then derided what he calls misinformation regarding what substances have been detected in the town’s water supply.
“There has never been arsenic detected in any of our drinking water sources, ever,” said Billips, “including the Shaker Road treatment plant which has been running carbon filtration units for 20 years.”
He added that some people have claimed that the arsenic is somehow produced by the carbon in the filters, a process that Billips called “chemically impossible.” Both arsenic and carbon are pure elements listed on the periodic table.
“It took a long time to get to this point,” said Billips, “I wish people would stop trying to spread misinformation.”
In the handout given by Billips, it notes that private wells in the city installed by the department of environmental protection have been running for more than a year and a half with no breakthrough of contaminates.
