What is going on with Spring Hill's water supply? (4-min. read)
As you have probably heard, Spring Hill is facing a temporary water supply shortage due to excessive temperatures and an abnormally long period with little precipitation. As a result, the City is asking residents to hold off on non-essential irrigation until the time in which we return to adequate storage levels in our water tanks. I know this is upsetting to many people in Spring Hill (especially those who have paid for the right to have irrigation meters) and I understand your frustration. I wanted to take a minute to explain three things to everyone: what is going on, how did we get here, and what is the City doing about it?
What is going on? (Warning: Reading this next section requires following some math)
Currently, the Spring Hill water system has 6.3 million gallons of storage in our water tanks across the City. Our Water Treatment Plant is designed to treat 4 million gallons per day. Additionally, we purchase 1 million gallons of water from Columbia Power and Water Services per day, resulting in roughly 5 million gallons per day of water available to the City between the two sources. If we use more than 5 million gallons per day, the overage comes from our water tanks. If we use less than 5 million gallons per day, the excess goes into the tanks to fill them to capacity.
In non-irrigation months, we know that the City uses roughly 3.8 million gallons per day of water. However, the City recognized last summer that in an extended period of hot, dry weather, the peak water usage exceeded the 5 million gallons of water per day that the City produces. It’s not unusual to have to dip into reserves occasionally- that's why a city has a reserve water supply in tanks. Upon recognizing last year in August 2021, the BOMA accelerated construction of an upgrade to our water booster station to increase the amount of water we can buy from Columbia Power and Water Service. The booster station would have been delayed for at least an additional year because it was part of a financing package funded by the federal government and, as such, had to go through federal government red tape and environmental studies. By making it a locally funded item, we were able to start construction immediately with an anticipated completion date of early May 2022.
Unfortunately, issues with the global supply chain delayed the booster station because the City has been unable to source critical components needed for its completion. Additionally, our peak demand has risen slightly due to new construction in the City. Moreover, we have seen two long stretches of extreme heat and no rain thus far this summer (including a 15-day hot and dry spell in May, which is typically the wettest month in Tennessee).
With all of those factors, we have had days where we use up to 800,000 gallons more than we can produce, meaning that we lost over 12% of our water reserves on the most extreme day. The booster station, once live, will allow us to buy an additional 3 million gallons per day from Columbia Power and Water Services. As you can see, this will enable Spring Hill to more than cover the additional peak usage that we saw this year and will set us up well moving forward.
How did we get here?
The most basic explanation is that the City grew faster than it could advance its infrastructure. I was seated on the BOMA last April, and we quickly hired Pam Caskie, our current city administrator, who then had the task of building a leadership team. Since she has come on, Ms. Caskie and her staff have performed admirably in moving infrastructure forward. We were immediately faced with a short-term water shortage with few options other than temporarily disconnecting irrigation meters until the dry weather subsided. It was then that city staff, and the BOMA accelerated the construction of the booster station. When you hear the critique that "the board hasn't acted," or is further contributing to the problem, know that this board acted within months of being seated to address an inherited problem. In fact, Spring Hill has known about this issue for some time as it instituted a similar irrigation ban back in September 2019. Moreover, Spring Hill’s last water tank was constructed in 2016 when Spring Hill’s population was just north of 34,000. The City has not built a new water tank in a time period when we added roughly 17,000 people (a 50% increase). It’s should be easy for most to see how we might have a shortage when improvements to infrastructure did not come before the impact of additional population.
One quick note- domestic water usage has never been at risk. We know that domestic usage is significantly below our water production capacities. Any shutoff or conservation has only been applicable to irrigation uses. Conservation is essential because the water tanks in our City hold reserves for our fire department to use in case they need to fight a structure fire.
What are we doing about it?
As discussed, the BOMA has already aggressively moved forward with the Booster Station, which will relieve the short-term water shortage when it goes live. It should come online within the next month and, realistically, much sooner.
On top of that, we have two other long-term solutions in the pipeline. The first is expanding our Water Treatment Plant to upgrade production capacity from 4 million gallons per day to 6 million gallons per day. This project started last October and has a scheduled completion date of April 2024 based on the current project timeline.
Moreover, we recognize that on top of producing more water, increasing our storage capacity will give us more infrastructure resilience in the face of unusual weather patterns. On Monday, the BOMA voted to start the process of upgrading a water tank on the south side of town to give us 1.7 million gallons of additional storage capacity. We also have two water tanks that are being constructed and primarily paid for by developments in the pipeline right now. We are exploring how we can incentivize developers to accelerate the construction of those two water tanks through a public-private partnership. These two tanks will provide us with over 4 million gallons of additional water storage.
As I hope you can see in this thousand-word essay, the BOMA is taking these concerns very seriously and implementing infrastructure improvements as fast as possible. The fault for this situation is not one, in my opinion, that falls at the feet of our citizens. It should have already been taken care of by improving infrastructure as we grew and my goal, as long as I am on the BOMA, is to make sure that we never fall into a situation like this again. That said, let’s all pitch in as Spring Hill citizens for the common good to ensure that our Spring Hill Fire Department has an adequate water supply to keep our community safe in case disaster strikes.