Cedar Rapids raising wells to protect water supply

It's not just timber that is reaching to the sky these days at spots in the floodway along the Cedar River north and west of downtown.

At 43 locations along the riverbank, the city is adding 10 additional feet of well casing to the top of each of its vertical wells to ensure that a repeat of the city's historic 2008 flood or even one worse won't shut down the city's drinking water system as it nearly did in 2008.

Well heads that had extended about 10 feet above the ground at the time of the flood are growing 10 feet taller and being painted a fresh, bright green. It can make it hard to see the forest for - for the well heads.

City Hall wasted little time in deciding to raise the city's vertical wells in the wake of the 2008 flood when floodwaters overtopped all 43 functioning vertical wells, knocked out two significantly more-productive horizontal collector wells, compromised a third and threatened a fourth, all of which sit in the city's three well fields that stretch 4 1/2 miles along the river. The wells pull water from the sand-filtered alluvium 43 to 75 feet below ground.

“We'd just been through this experience, and raising the vertical wells in the big scheme of things, isn't that expensive,” said Bruce Jacobs, the city's utilities engineering manager, explaining the city's thinking about protecting its water supply in the event of another significant flood.

He puts the cost to raise the 43 vertical wells at about $2.1 million, all of which the Federal Emergency Management Agency has agreed to pay.

“Now, if we have another (flood) event, and everything goes the way it did before, the water system should be secure,” Jacobs said.

After all, one of the great dramas that unfolded as flood water was cresting in Cedar Rapids in June 2008 was the frenzy to save the last functioning well of the city's 47 - 43 vertical, four collector wells - that had been working at the time.

Jacobs calls it the story of the “famous collector well #3.”

As word circulated that the last of the city's wells was about to get knocked out of service, a few hundred citizens poured out to the site of collector well #3, located on the south side of the river just above the Edgewood Road bridge, to help sandbag in an effort to keep the well working.

“The hundreds of people coming down the road to sandbag the thing was just astonishing to us,” Jacobs said. “That was very uplifting.”

Greg Eyerly, the city's utilities operations manager at the time who was at the well site as flood water rose, calls it “a miracle” that the well continued to pump water. The volunteers and city crews were great, he said, but they only had a chance to save collector well #3 because access to it had not been cut off by the rising river the day before the crest.

All and all, “it's kind of like the lucky shot into the wastebasket at the office. Just don't ask me to do it twice,” said Eyerly, who subsequently became the city's flood recovery director and now is wastewater treatment manager for the city of Salem, Ore.

In the saving, collector well #3 was able to provide about one-third of the city's average daily water supply of about 36 million gallons, Jacobs said. Even so, for a time the city's largest industrial customers stopped using water, and citywide, the call went out to conserve. People were told not to shower or bathe.

Two days later, collector well #4, which was reached by boat with the help of the U.S. Coast Guard, was brought back on line, and the crisis lessened.

“So then we were hanging by two threads instead of one, which was a big improvement,” Jacobs said. “ ... It was a really good thing we didn't lose the water system. It was one less thing. I think it gave the community quite a lift. They could still get a drink of water just by turning the tap open.”

Both collector wells #3 and #4, which are substantial aboveground structures that can't be raised, had oil-filled chambers to cool them, which helped keep water from each of the well's electrical systems. By contrast, collector wells #1 and #2 were air cooled and flood water knocked out the electrical systems.

The cooling systems now have been changed, Jacobs said. In addition, the city is moving ahead to build two additional collector wells, and both of those will be 9 to 11 feet above the height of the 2008 flood, In the first weeks after the flood, the roads into the city's well fields were impassable and so the city used helicopters to lift the motors from the flooded vertical wells and to fly them off for repair.

In short order, the city then began to plan to raise the vertical wells - each of which has the capacity to send between 0.8 and 1.7 million gallons of water a day to the city's two water treatment plants - even before the Federal Emergency Management Agency determined if it would help pay the bill. In the end, though, FEMA agreed to foot the $2.1 million project cost. (story continues below map)

Work to raise the 18 vertical wells in the city's Seminole Valley Park well field now is complete, and just last week, contract crews began work on raising 17 vertical wells in the city's east well field (in the city's northeast quadrant north of the river) in an area across the Cedar River from Ellis Park. Work on another 8 vertical wells in the west well field (in the city's northwest quadrant and south of the river) above the Ellis Boat Harbor will take place next year.

The city's Jacobs said the city figured in 2008 that its wells sat high enough to withstand a flood that reached about 26 1/2 feet, 6 feet above the previous record flood. The 2008 flood, though, climbed to 31.12 feet.

The city is adding 10 feet of casing to the vertical wells because the standard length of casing is 10 feet, he explained.

Mayor Ron Corbett, who has expressed disappointment at the second defeat of a local ballot measure to extend the local-option sales tax to provide local funds to help build a flood-protection system, said he has tried to point out how much federal and state disaster aid has come to the city, its residents and businesses in making the case to extend the local sales tax.

In any event, Corbett said the outside disaster help is protecting the city to a degree even without flood protection. In the event of another flood, the city's drinking water should be safe, he said.