Patch job ahead for Enigma’s main water well as city mulls permanent fix

By C.S. Carter

  

Forty or more Enigma residents were present

for Monday night’s meeting

ENIGMA, Berrien County, Georgia – Enigma residents are waiting and hoping with crossed fingers that the city will fix a main water well before sand coming through a crevice in the well’s wall causes a collapse.

For now, the city sees its best fix as a sleeve that would cover the hole. “You’re talking about a patch,” said newly elected council member Rick Maluda at a May 5 meeting. “They don’t do full length sleeves anymore.”

It would work like this, said Jody Joyner, maintenance director: It would be a sleeve they shrink and lower to where the hole is. Once there, the sleeve would expand out to cover the whole.

Enigma Councilman Rick Maluda

The best solution is a new master well, Maluda said, but lamented that the cost could be as high as $200,000, a burdensome amount for the city.

In the meantime, added Maluda, “There is a possibility that the well can cave in.”

In that scenario, Enigma could use a backup temporary well that may or may not meet the water needs of the city of 1,200 people in a sustained way, according to the councilman.

In addition to costs of a new well, Enigma would have to hire an engineer to design the well’s specifications and get the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency “to tell us where to put it,” said Maluda.

The problem is not new; it’s merely getting worse, said Joyner, who has worked in Enigma’s maintenance department for eight years.

“We’ve had sand in the system for a while now,” he said in a recent interview,

Joyner said he has been going through the entire system with flushing of dead-end lines every 30 days and the other lines every 90 days.

He clears some lines every 10 days, he said.

A recent check by a contractor from Dublin showed test buckets placed in the six-inch well did not fill up with sand but did have sand in them and a small amount of clay, Joyner said.

For now, Joyner said he can do little more than keep flushing the lines. But that is unlikely to prove a full remedy, Joyner noted.

The maintenance department blew the sand out of one resident’s two-inch line on May 2. “We checked it this morning. It still has good water pressure,” he said.

ButJoyner expects that the sand will be back. “I’m sure it’s going to get more in it,” he said.

The maintenance crew planned to run a camera into the well this week to examine the crack. “We’ll take a look at it and see where the hole is,” Joyner said.

The hole is above the pump in the well, he said.

When the pump is pumping, sand is falling through the pipe’s crevice and the pump “is throwing it right backinto the pipe,” Joyner said.

The sleeve is only a temporary fix, Joyner noted, while estimating the cost of a new master well at $250,000, substantially higher than the City Council estimate.

The flushing is showing some benefits, Joyner said, and cited the absence of sand coming from testing of open fire hydrants.  “We had a fire hydrant near the shop that seemed like it would throw sand everywhere. But it’s no longer doing that because we’re flushing the line every 10 days,” the maintenance chief said.

He cautioned it’s not always possible to know whether the water is free of sand, “Some of it is so minute that you can’t see it.”

It is “all wear and tear,” Joyner noted of the well problem and its 40-plus years of use.

 

Enigmas City Council:  (L-R)  Post 4 Rick Maluda, Post 3 Ronald Harbin, Mayor Cecil Giddens, Post 2 Doug Webb, Post 1 Donald Franklin