You may not have noticed a difference in your water but the City of Kenai has installed and began using two new wells, upping their production levels.
Rick Koch: “If you’re not being noticed when you’re running a water and sewer system, then you’re successful. When you get noticed things aren’t so good.”
That was City Manager Rick Koch who says they recently brought one large, high-production well and a small, medium production well online.
Koch: “We probably gained about 1,000 gallons per minute of production if we need to ramp it up that high. We are guardedly optimistic but we’re very confident that the situations in the past which we asked people to voluntarily conserve water, those won’t happen any longer. It will not be necessary to bring on a couple of our older production wells which have higher levels of arsenic.”
He says the two new wells should also take care of any production issues should the Division of Forestry need to fill water tankers at the Kenai Municipal airport as they have had to for previous fires.
The new wells do not eliminate the need for construction of a new water storage reservoir for Kenai, which began today.