Well 7 exceeds expectations

MT. PLEASANT — Mt. Pleasant Municipal Utilities finished a several year $3 million water well project this week, as they ran a final 24-hour test period beginning Tuesday.

With the addition of this new well, residents won’t see a lot of difference immediately, however, Water Supervisor Loren Rich says, it will make a difference.

Occasionally customers have seen restrictions on water usage in times of high demand or water main breaks, but with this higher capacity well installation, more buffer room will exist.

According to Project Manager Jerry Phipps, three purposes drive the addition of Well 7 to Mt. Pleasant.

“Well Four, which serves downtown, is from the 1940s and it has outlived its useful life,” Phipps said. “So purpose number one is to replace the 1940s Well.”

According to Phipps, Well Four could eventually be abandoned or remain in the backup, but with Well 7 up and running, that opens the door for planning a new water plant.

“Purpose number two is to serve a future water treatment plant that will be built at the Well 7 site that’ll be a higher capacity than the existing water treatment plant,” he continued.

The new Well 7 is a Jordan Well which is the same kind of well as those already existing wells in Mt. Pleasant.

“They’re all Joran Wells, this is just a higher capacity,” Phipps said. “This has a capacity of about 2,000 gallons per minute … that’s the same capacity as your Well 6.”

Cahoy Pump Services Senior Project Manager Lloyd Wurzer Well 7 is drilled 1,900 feet deep starting with a 24-inch opening and stepping down to 18 inches as they reach the Jordan layer of earth from which they draw the water.

According to Wurzer at the beginning of the 24-hour test Well 7 was exceeding expectations.

“Everything is running good,” he said Wednesday afternoon. “It is running at 2,097 gallons a minute.”

Over the course of the 24-hour test, Well 7 will pump approximately 2 million gallons of water.

Once testing is completed and they have gathered all the necessary record-keeping information, they will remove the temporary pipe protruding above ground, place the permanent underground pipe, and drive their large trucks away from the site.

While the multiyear project was completed in an expected amount of time, Mt. Pleasant’s Utilities took a different approach when it came to the bids for this $3 million project.

“The project was completed in three different packages,” Phipps explained.

These packages include one to drill the well with Cahoy Pump Services, a second for building the piping and electrical equipment along with site work with Woodruff Construction, and a third bid package for connecting the well to the existing water plants and the ground storage reservoir with Fye Construction.

According to Phipps, dividing the project into multiple bid packages helped to keep project costs down partially by avoiding contractor markups.

Part of the funds for this project came from a $500,000 Economic Development Administration Grant through the Southeast Iowa Regional Planning Commission.

Comments: AnnaMarie.Ward@southeastiowaunion.com