The first results in Portland’s yearlong water sampling program in the Bull Run watershed provided the city with good news. The Portland Water Bureau announced Tuesday that lab samples found no evidence of the parasite cryptosporidium in the Bull Run reservoirs.

Portland officials are trying to make the case to the Environmental Protection Agency that the city’s water source has very little risk of cryptosporidium contamination. An EPA rule would otherwise require Portland to build a new treatment plant, estimated to cost $100 million.

Portland has tested for cryptosporidium in the past, said Yone Akagi, the bureau’s regulatory compliance manager, but only at the water intake point. The new round of testing also takes water samples from six potential “hot spots” in the reservoirs. Those are areas, such as tributaries, where cryptosporidium might be expected to be found.

Cryptosporidium, which is transferred by animal feces, forms hardy cysts called oocysts. The first round of samples to come back from the laboratory found no oocysts at either the water intake or the hot spots. The samples were taken in December and January.

Portland must meet a tough standard to get a variance from the EPA rule: the water from Bull Run has to be as free of cryptosporidium as water from agencies that actively treat for the parasite. If one oocyst turns up in the water intake, Akagi said, the city could cross that threshold.

Portland officials don’t want any cryptosporidium at the hot spots either, Akagi said, but finding an oocyst there doesn’t mean the parasite will make its way into the city’s water. “There’s no threshold at the hot spots,” she said. “(The EPA will) take that and use it to evaluate how risky our watershed is.”

If the EPA found Portland’s water needed additional cryptosporidium treatment, the city would need to have a new system up and running by 2014. That doesn’t leave much time for such a big project.

As a result, Water Bureau officials are taking two parallel paths: they’re designing a treatment system while also pursuing the water testing program that they hope will prove that more treatment is unnecessary.

The post No cryptosporidium found in Bull Run appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

Shh! If you end up bidding on the Water Bureau’s Walker Creek Culvert Project (See , registration required), you better keep the information to yourself.

The project, which will construct a fish friendly culvert from Walker Creek to allow migration in and out of Bull Run Reservoir, requires all bidders to fill out a confidentiality form. The form says that disclosure of any information designated as “for non-disclosure or confidential” related to the project could cause significant risk to public health and safety.

So what could be dangerous about a fish culvert?

“According to our chief engineer, the reason it’s confidential is the project involves the location of our conduits,” said WB public information officer Jennie Day-Burget. “The same rules apply to other projects related to conduits. The more people know about them and their location, the more at risk our water supply has become.”

The post Top Secret: Culvert project appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

Shh! If you end up bidding on the Water Bureau’s Walker Creek Culvert Project (See , registration required), you better keep the information to yourself.

The project, which will construct a fish friendly culvert from Walker Creek to allow migration in and out of Bull Run Reservoir, requires all bidders to fill out a confidentiality form. The form says that disclosure of any information designated as “for non-disclosure or confidential” related to the project could cause significant risk to public health and safety.

So what could be dangerous about a fish culvert?

“According to our chief engineer, the reason it’s confidential is the project involves the location of our conduits,” said WB public information officer Jennie Day-Burget. “The same rules apply to other projects related to conduits. The more people know about them and their location, the more at risk our water supply has become.”

The post Top Secret: Culvert project appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

When they aren’t busy lauding the crisp, plastic-free taste of Bull Run water, it appears the Portland Water Bureau has been busy installing a at its Columbia South Shore Well Field.

When the sun is really cooking, the new system can produce up to 267,000 watts of electricity, enough to offset power for 50 Pacific Northwest homes. Even on the Winter Solstice, the shortest, darkest day of the year, the system produced 9,000 watts, which is enough to power two or three homes. The juice will also offset power usage at the well field.

Commissioner Randy Leonard will be on hand to flip the switch on the array at a celebration on January 26 from 1 to 2 p.m. at 16400 NE Airport Way, in Portland. With food, music and tours of the system on the agenda, there ain’t no party like a Water Bureau party this month in Portland.

The post Flip the switch on the slough appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

When they aren’t busy lauding the crisp, plastic-free taste of Bull Run water, it appears the Portland Water Bureau has been busy installing a at its Columbia South Shore Well Field.

When the sun is really cooking, the new system can produce up to 267,000 watts of electricity, enough to offset power for 50 Pacific Northwest homes. Even on the Winter Solstice, the shortest, darkest day of the year, the system produced 9,000 watts, which is enough to power two or three homes. The juice will also offset power usage at the well field.

Commissioner Randy Leonard will be on hand to flip the switch on the array at a celebration on January 26 from 1 to 2 p.m. at 16400 NE Airport Way, in Portland. With food, music and tours of the system on the agenda, there ain’t no party like a Water Bureau party this month in Portland.

The post Flip the switch on the slough appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

Portland Water Bureau officials are preparing a construction contract they hope never to use. The bureau last week released a request for proposals to design a treatment plant at the Bull Run watershed, the source of Portland’s drinking water.

The step comes in response to an Environmental Protection Agency rule requiring the city to treat its water for cryptosporidium, a parasite that can sicken people. At the same time, city officials are making a case that Portland doesn’t have a problem with the parasite and shouldn’t have to build a new plant, estimated to cost $385 million, to treat it.

Portland officials have challenged the rule in court. They’ve tried to get Congress to change the rule. The court challenge failed and the legislative effort hasn’t gained traction.

Officials twice proposed a plan for getting an exemption, called a variance, from the rule. Both failed. Now they’re making a third push for a variance, but they’re running out of time.

If the current effort fails, Portland will need to have a treatment plant operating by April 1, 2014, or the city could face EPA penalties. Because designing and building a plant might take three years, officials can’t afford to wait around for a variance, said David Shaff, the Water Bureau administrator.

“We have to do things in parallel because there’s just not time,” Shaff said. “The goal is for those things to intersect so by the time we have to break ground on building what we have to design, we will have heard on whether we get the variance.”

Portland’s first two tries at getting a variance didn’t meet EPA standards, said Harold Rogers, the agency’s drinking water coordinator for Oregon. First, city officials proposed studying Portland-area cases of cryptosporidium infection in humans.

“It’s a great idea, and we hope that they go ahead and do that plan anyway,” Rogers said. But it doesn’t address what’s in the water at the source.

Second, Portland officials asked to provide fewer water samples than EPA officials wanted, Rogers said, but with more water in each sample to make up for the difference. “That’s very complicated,” he said, “because they had to prove to us that the method, that was unproven before, would work.”

Last week, Portland officials started collecting water samples at Bull Run as part of a new case for a variance. This time, the city and EPA are working together more closely.

“The first two (times) we were pretty much on our own and felt we got burned by EPA saying you’re doing it all wrong,” Shaff said. For the third attempt, he said, they’re following EPA guidance and precisely documenting each step.

“They know what we are proposing to do and it’s based on what they told us,” Shaff said.

Even if Portland follows all the EPA guidance, there’s no guarantee it will get a variance from the treatment rule. Portland officials need to prove that the city’s untreated water is as safe as water from cities that treat their water.

They also have to show that, as they have maintained, the protected Bull Run watershed has very little risk of becoming contaminated with cryptosporidium, whose spores are passed in animal feces. That requires setting up models to better understand how the watershed works, Rogers said.

After a year of sampling, if EPA grants Portland a variance, city officials don’t have to build a plant, at least for a while.

That doesn’t mean the RFP process for design work on the plant will have been wasted, Shaff said. Chances are good that the EPA will require city officials to have design work completed in case water quality worsens in the future.

“It’s pretty clear to us that if we achieve the variance, there’s going to be strings attached,” Shaff said. “This is not going to be $12 million down the drain.”

A variance could last three years, Rogers said. In the meantime, city officials would need to keep checking the water quality, although probably not as often. They would use those data to make the case for a renewal of the variance.

“Just because they may qualify and we grant the variance doesn’t mean that monitoring is going to stop,” Rogers said. “It’s not a one-shot deal.”

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