Agenda - 10-30-2002 - 1 (AOG) - Laserfiche WebLink

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19 I think another issue that is before us is, Are we doing enough to protect the watershed around Jordan Lake? In the inter basin transfer decision, one of the conditions that was tied to that was that Cary and Apex adopt a protection program similar to those that were adopted for the entire Neuse basin. Should similar conditions be tied to the allocation of the water off of Jordan Lake? Should that be added as a condition on the allocation? What we hear here is a lot of very active local governments dealing with their water problems. We hear Durham and Raleigh are going to look at Kerr Lake. I understand that's a tough subject to discuss publicly. But in that process, are all of our interests being represented? If not all of our interests, then how do we shape the process to make sure that all of our interests are represented in that? Having been a veteran of the Virginia Beach wars, you see what happens when one local government takes the lead and others are playing games in the process about withholding supplies. If we're going that direction, and it clearly is not too early to get started on that, I think there's a question about how do we promote the reuse of these resources. Those are some of the questions I would throw out for discussion. And you may have other questions that you want to raise as well. Let's come back to the question of preparedness. How prepared are we? Ed Kerwin: Not very prepared, sir. The idea of an emergency certainly, I think is really different in people's minds than it was prior to September 11th, and there really isn't anything that is unimaginable anymore with respect to our services. So, from that point of view we're not as prepared as we need to be. We have in our capital project things to improve the capacity of the interconnections with the City of Durham, also with Chatham and Hillsborough. But, if we lost Cane Creek, I don't have a good plan that is validated by our neighbors that they'll be there to meet the needs. And certainly the spirit of good neighbors, I know that if somebody can help, they will. But we just don't have things thought through and in place where we know exactly how we would respond. And spending more time talking about that would be very useful. I know that was a subject on May 2nd quite a bit regarding one facility. But there are many situations like that that we certainly could be better prepared than we are. Dr. Moreau: And if I ask you for a protection plan, do you have a document you can hand me? Ed Kerwin: We have emergency management plans, we have drills, particularly with the towns and the counties. I feel like we're reasonable well prepared. But again, for what? I feel like we're reasonable well prepared for a hurricane better than we were for Hurricane Fran. Are we prepared if we lose 75% of our water supply? No. I feel like we've done a lot and we've improved a lot at a staff level with all of our neighboring utilities. We interact fairly regularly and talk about these things. But, have we talked about it enough? No. Is there more we should do? Absolutely. Dr. Moreau: I'm not trying to suggest that we've been derelict in that because I'm aware it's been a topic for a long time. I still worry about what happens if we had a major failure. What would we do? Terry Roland: I can speak about that a little bit from Durham's perspective. And it's the same problem OWASA has, I think, but just a little bit bigger. And that is that none of our interconnections are big enough to meet the total need. Our interconnection with OWASA is good for about 3-3.5 million gallons a day. Our interconnection with Cary is good for about five. Our interconnection with Chatham is probably good for two or three, but their treatment capacity is three, and they're using one and a half of that or so. Reality can't count much more on a million and a half there presently. Dr. Moreau: I remember the days when the Durham/OWASA interconnection was made and it was done in a really expedited fashion. Terry Roland: Certainly the line connections can be expanded pretty quickly. The problem is in the treatment and supply side. We're working on an agreement and a plan for interconnecting with Raleigh that would also give us some additional supply capability, but in all of the cases I think we're limited to whatever our neighbors can afford to give up in terms of supply. You can build a waterline pretty quick, but you can't build additional treatment capacity quickly, and you can't build additional raw water supply quickly. So that becomes the limiting element. Right now the limiting element is our interconnection. But if we build bigger interconnections; if we lost our whole system, we're running about 30 million gallons a day, and even if we had a big line interconnection with Raleigh, I doubt seriously they have that much excess capacity that they could meet that need. We would have to go to rationing which means 30 gallons a person per day which would be about six million gallons a day. So we could take our demand down from 30 million to six if we had to. It wouldn't be fun and it wouldn't be pretty, but we could do it. Then you could do some of the things with the interconnections we have. It would take a disaster of great magnitude to get to that. Ms. Speaker: I had a meeting about a month ago with the folks at Duke University, and their concern from their board was what kind of redundancy did we have in case there was this catastrophe. One of the advantages we have is that we do have two reservoirs, two water plants. So we have a redundancy that for