Brown water made grey T-shirt

An Electric City man brought proof of brown water and the damage it caused to the city council meeting last Tuesday night.

Dan Nagle, who lives on Grand Avenue West, pulled two plastic bottles from a cooler and showed city officials that there was a brown water residue in each.

Then he opened a gym bag and showed council members two T-shirts, one a tattletale gray, and the other one white. He said the grayish T-shirt had been washed in Electric City water and that it had been as white as the clean looking shirt he held up. He said that he took the water samples on July 18 and Aug. 22.

He wanted to know what the city was going to do about it.

Mayor Jerry Sands said that the city hasn’t received any brown water complaints since it re-started the arsenic treatment plant about three weeks ago.

The plant, started up last February, had apparently made enough of a change in the water that some inner pipe residues came loose, causing the brown water problem. The city shut it down for a time.

Sands asked Nagle if his water was brown now and Nagle answered, “No.”

Before the plant was shut down, the city received a torrent of brown water complaints and a number were brought up at a city council meeting.

Nagle stated that he bleached the grayish T-shirt twice, but it still didn’t bring back its white color.