Outage fouled the water

DINGMAN - School officials now believe that a power outage or surge may have been responsible for the water odor at the Dingman Delaware Primary School last week. The District Director for Support Services, Marvin Eversdyke, said there was no smoking gun, but the buildings pumps were found to be warm last Wednesday morning when they should not have been. That meant they had been filling the tanks when there should not have been a need, he said. Eversdyke said an outage would prompt the system to drain. In draining, a vacuum effect on a hose in one of the janitors’ closets may have drawn some detergent back into the system. The odor detected last week dissipated later in the week and was gone Monday. Three sets of tests by the Department of Environmental Protection have all come back negative, he said. Based on the test results, the state has granted conditional approval to use the system again, Eversdyke said. Installation of new sensors and system checks, which would prevent another occurrence, are the condition for state approval. He and an engineer from McGoey Hauser and Edsall will do a system check to work out the specifics. But Eversdyke said he prefers to stay on bottled water until any new work is completed, rather than risk a reoccurrence. “It really wouldn’t look good to have it happen again,” he concluded.