It wasn’t a downpour but it was enough to raise the water level at both reservoirs and ease fears of shortages, Public Works Director Tom Wetor said of the rainfall Sunday and Monday.
“Overall, I’m feeling pretty good,” he said Monday morning.
With just a few weeks left of the heaviest water demand for salmon processing, and with the traditionally rainy weather of early fall approaching, Wetor thinks Wrangell will make it through the summer. “We’re in pretty good shape right now.”
The borough last week urged residents to conserve water after a dry few weeks put a dent in the community’s reservoirs.
Like the rest of Southeast Alaska, Wrangell is surrounded by North America’s largest temperate rainforest — the Tongass. But living in a rainforest doesn’t prevent all water issues.
Wrangell was at about 70% of its normal rainfall for the month as of July 25, according to the National Weather Service in Juneau. Less than an inch total was forecast through Tuesday before dry days are expected back through to the weekend.
That dry spell and higher-than-average water consumption had left Wrangell on the edge of implementing mandatory conservation measures. The community has been using close to a million gallons of treated water per day in recent weeks, according to a report from the Public Works Department — pushing the water treatment plant’s production capacity.
“We’ve had a dry couple of weeks,” Borough Manager Jeff Good told the borough assembly July 25. “We’re four feet down on the lower reservoir. The upper reservoir is full, but no longer spilling, so they have started siphoning.”
The upper reservoir has a capacity of about 47 million gallons, while the lower reservoir has a capacity of about 21 million. But some of that water is unusable because the drainpipes don’t come in at the very bottom.
Wetor estimated Monday that the community had just over two months of water in the reservoirs, with the upper reservoir down about two feet, same as the lower.
“We’re seesawing back and forth between the two reservoirs,” he explained, drawing from one or the other depending on water levels.
If the reservoirs get too low, the borough has a water emergency plan. If the supply drops below 60 days, that kicks off the first stage of the management plan, which was adopted in 2017 in the wake of major shortages.
“We’ve been teetering on the edge of that for probably close to two weeks here now,” Wetor said July 26.
Wetor said water usage has been pushing the production limit of the treatment plant, averaging 860,000 gallons per day.
Since it came online, the plant’s capacity has been increased slightly to 1 million gallons per day. And the town can also store about a million gallons of treated water in its tanks — another day’s worth of water. Those two days are not a lot of wiggle room.
Wetor said part of the strain could be that the Trident Seafoods processing plant, one of two local seafood processors, is running for the first time since 2019. Coincidentally, that was the last time the community implemented water conservation measures. During its two-month busy season, Wetor said Trident can use upwards of 2 million gallons of water.
But it’s a broader local problem. Wrangell has faced periodic water shortages for years. Some issues with the supply have been tied back to the treatment plant itself.
“It’s a sand filter, it’s based on gravity,” Wetor said. “You can only put so much water in, and the weight and the pressure from that water is only going to push through those slow sand filters so fast. So that’s where our biggest limitation comes in.”
The borough is in the process of designing a new water treatment plant, which is expected to be able to produce 2.3 million gallons per day — more than double the current capacity.
“If we develop the Alder Top Village subdivision or the (6-Mile) mill property, or the community grows in any kind of way, we need to be planning for the future and 20 years down the road,” Wetor said.
But more output won’t solve the other issue — storage capacity. The reservoirs can only hold around 68 days of water, and the earthen dams are a century old and are two of the most unstable dams in the state according to the Department of Natural Resources.
“For us to fix our dams, you’re talking tens of millions of dollars for us to stabilize or increase storage capacity up there,” Wetor said. “That is a massive, major project.”
The Sentinel contributed reporting for this story.
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