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Updated 1 hour ago
Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto is calling for a “targeted investigation” into recent water issues in the city.
Peduto issued a press release Tuesday morning announcing he had directed the Office of Municipal Investigations (OMI) to begin an investigation at the Pittsburgh Water & Sewer Authority (PWSA) to discover why the authority was forced to issue a flush and boil water advisory last week, causing upheaval for some 100,000 city residents.
“This is not a fishing expedition. We simply want to discover what went wrong, and how to keep these events from happening again,” Peduto said in the statement.
Peduto spokesman Tim McNulty said OMI typically investigates complaints only against city employees, but Peduto wanted a professional team to find out exactly what caused the chlorine glitch.
“This is a unique situation,” McNulty said. “The mayor with support of the (PWSA) board just wanted them to ask some questions while last week's incident is still fresh in the minds of people. He just wants to be sure it doesn't happen again.“
Regulators issued the boil order because they discovered that water at the water treatment plant was insufficiently exposed to chlorine.
“The issue in (state regulators') minds was you need to provide a certain amount of protection — they call it a log removal — which is the amount of chlorine you have in the water and the amount of time the water is exposed to it before a customer drinks it,” said Bob Weimar, PWSA's interim director of engineering.
PWSA had thought it was taking the treated water one to two hours to get to customers, according to Weimar, but testing at DEP's request showed it was taking only 40 to 55 minutes. That placed PWSA about 25 percent below state standards for chlorine contact periods, Weimar said.
Late Wednesday night, PWSA provided DEP with documentation and data to prove the authority achieved compliance. Officials from the city, PWSA and DEP met Thursday morning to discuss the latest analysis.
Peduto's administration is also coordinating with state Auditor General Eugene DePasquale on an outside audit of the authority, which Pittsburgh City Council requested last week.
According to the release, OMI will conduct interviews with PWSA employees to evaluate the operations and staffing of its water systems and testing, as well as the equipment the authority uses to filter and test its water. That may include looks into a possible system failure at the Highland Park reservoir; a failure by an authority chlorometer; and whether there were operator errors.
The investigation has already started,. according to the release.
“Separately the PWSA board, with the support of the Peduto Administration, will today be inviting the Auditor General to conduct its own performance investigations of authority operations,” the release said.
Additionally, the Mayor is calling for an audit of lead testing kits and results sent to authority customers. From January through December 2016 6,625 testing kits were ordered from the PWSA but less than half (3,100) were returned for review.
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