The widespread publicity Jackson has received about its troubled water system has sparked questions to Greenwood Utilities about the water it supplies to residents and businesses in Greenwood.
Brian Finnegan, the publicly owned utility’s CEO, assures customers they have nothing about which to worry.
“From Greenwood Utilities, you get clean, you get safe, you get reliable, you get cheap water,” he told the Greenwood Rotary Club Tuesday.
Greenwood Utilities has a five-year, $5 million plan to keep it that way, Finnegan said.
He shied away from saying who was responsible for Jackson’s recent water crisis, which left the capital city under a boil water notice for nearly two months and most of its taps dry for several days in late August and early September. But he said the problems are rooted in a longstanding lack of proper maintenance.
“I’m here to tell you that we’re not going to let that happen,” the Greenwood Utilities executive said.
The company has partnered with Waggoner Engineering, a multi-state civil engineering firm headquartered in Jackson, to repair and upgrade a water system that delivers 65 to 70 million gallons a month on average to its customers.
The capital improvement plan calls for replacing 4 miles of pipe where problems with leaks have been identified, repainting all five of the system’s elevated water tanks (one has already been completed), and upgrading the technology on the system’s more than 16,000 water and electricity meters.
He said the utility company is conscious of the efforts the city has made to repave streets and will try wherever possible to use boring to lay the new pipe rather than cut them up: “We’re going to try to be as minimally invasive as we possibly can, where we can.”
The current electrical meters, installed in 2010 for residential customers, were early-generation efforts to reduce the amount of manpower needed to read them. They require a meter reader to drive through neighbors equipped with a laptop to fetch the usage data. The new “smart” meters will eliminate even that human involvement.
The water meters will be equipped with a new module that transmits their data to the electric meters, which will in turn forward that information and the customer’s electricity consumption to the utility’s offices.
“It’s going to help us be more efficient and effective,” said Finnegan. “We’re going to make sure that billing is more accurate, more timely.”
Greenwood Utilities draws its water from a series of seven wells that tap into an alluvial aquifer about 800 feet below the ground.
The quality of the water from the aquifer is nearly pristine, Finnegan said.
“We are very blessed with the water that’s in that aquifer,” he said. “We have to do very little to get that water from the aquifer to your house. Basically we add a little chlorine, and that’s all we’ve got to do.”
Continuing a longstanding policy, Greenwood Utilities has no plans to fluoridate the water, a measure that dental health experts say would reduce tooth decay, particularly in children. Finnegan said the issue has been too controversial, with advocates and opponents in the community sharply divided on adding the naturally occurring mineral to the water.
“Since there are other ways to get fluoride, our company has chosen not to” fluoridate, he said.
At the same time that Greenwood Utilities is upgrading its water system, it is adjusting to heightened lead and copper regulations adopted last year by the federal government.
Exposure to the metals, which is usually caused by leaching from older pipes and plumbing fixtures, can cause serious health problems, especially in children and pregnant women.
Over the next two years, the utility company is required to inventory the service lines that run from its main pipes to its more than 7,000 customers’ water meters. Finnegan is confident the inventory will show that most of the lead and copper issues are on the customer’s side of the water meter, not the utility’s.
Even still, he said, the most recent survey indicated that exposure to lead and copper in tap water is minimal in Greenwood. In 2021, a random sampling of 30 customers found that lead and copper levels were at least six times below the threshold that would require any remedial action from the utility company.
“We’re going to comply with the lead and copper items and do everything we’ve got to do, but we feel really, really good about our water,” he said.
- Contact Tim Kalich at 662-581-7243 or tkalich@gwcommonwealth.com.
