People in Lovington suddenly found themselves without water this past Friday due to a problem with the municipal water system. At around 5:30 PM, due to a faulty reading in the city’s automated system, some residents began noticing their water wasn’t running.
Several folks took to social media to complain and ask questions about what was going on. On their Facebook Page, the City of Lovington put out a statement about the issue saying residents “may experience little to no water pressure.”
The Facebook post came a couple hours after the problem was first noticed and Public Works Director Wyatt Duncan manually shut off the system’s water pumps.
While this is not the only water system hiccup Lovington residents have faced in recent times, it is certainly the most wide-reaching with all municipal water customers being affected during the period city employees worked to fix the issue. Duncan explained that the culprit was a malfunctioning transducer. Transducers are used to translate physical measurements, such as pressure, into electrical signals that can be used by computerized systems.
The problematic transducer told the city’s SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) system that the tanks had “minimal water” resulting in all three pumps being turned on automatically. “With all three pumps on it was moving over 10,000 gallons of water per minute,” said Duncan.
The water system had to be taken off automatic control as a result. Public Works employees worked through the evening to fix the issue and service was restored with full pressure around 10:00 PM that night. In a subsequent Facebook post, the City of Lovington encouraged residents to conserve water to help the system catch up with demand and refill its reservoirs. Lovington has a total capacity of 4.4 million gallons at its Chaparral reservoir.
The system has continued to be run manually since the problem occurred. “We were controlling the system by hand, manually. We couldn’t leave anything in auto,” Duncan explained. “Currently right now we’re going to continue in manual mode until we can get the transducers fixed.” Fixing the transducers will require an electrical technician coming in from out of town to assess the situation and order new parts. So until that happens, the automated SCADA system will not be able to run because it can’t properly measure the amount of water in the reservoir tanks. However, for Lovington residents the problem is resolved and their water service has been fully restored.
“Our water tanks are all full. All the reservoirs are all full. We’re having the electrical tech come out first thing in the morning.”
Wyatt Duncan, Director of Public Works
There are some important takeaways from this situation which the Public Works Department will use to improve its system moving forward. “I do see one fault that we need to get [the electrical tech] down for,” Duncan noted. He explained that the programming of the SCADA system would be adjusted based on some of the findings following this incident.
People with their own private wells did not experience any water problems, though only a handful of properties within Lovington have private wells and those are only authorized for irrigation use. Duncan estimates this number around seven. Outside city limits, private wells are common however.
All in all, Lovington was without water for approximately 4.5 hours Friday evening and the community was asked to conserve water once service was restored. It took almost the whole weekend for the reservoirs to fill back up. Even though the issue is now resolved and the tanks are full, Duncan still encourages people to conserve water, particularly during the summer months, in order to reduce stress on the pumps. People should look to fill up swimming pools and do other water-intensive activities in off-peak hours such as the late evening, says Duncan.
Currently the Public Works Department has no other way of informing all town residents of problems, but there have been talks of piggybacking on the Lovington School’s text alert system. For now, the City of Lovington Facebook page is the primary place for notices involving issues with the municipal water supply. Residents can also call the Public Works Department’s non-emergency line at 575-396-2811 to report issues or check for ongoing problems.
Water has long been a top and growing concern for people in New Mexico, particularly in the dry southeast of the state, as the Ogallala aquifer depletes and much of the state’s river water is used up by surrounding states and industry. The City of Hobbs has a water conservation policy in place throughout summer to help save water, but despite these local efforts, the state is not water-secure.
However, the issue facing Lovington on Friday was not caused by drought or water shortage. It was due to a malfunctioning electrical component. Still, the outage and conservation over the weekend as the reservoirs refilled gave Lovington residents a glimpse of an all-too-likely future for people in water poor areas of the country.
