SHERIDAN — A lightning strike late Saturday night or early Sunday morning seriously damaged the South Sheridan Water Association’s treatment plant, affecting between 3,000 and 4,000 customers.
Crews worked all day Sunday and into early Monday to locate the water association’s main water line and connect it to the Sheridan Water Department’s water line, but repairs to the damaged system could take months, according to one official. For now, there is a boil order in place because the water association’s lines, as well as those of the Little Creek Water Association, which also gets its water from the South Sheridan plant, lost pressure.
Sheridan Mayor Cain Nattin said the event could have been worse had it not been for key individuals and companies that helped workers get to the two water lines and bring in the equipment necessary to patch the two systems together.
“Some customers lost pressure and others were losing it rapidly because all the water they had was coming from South Sheridan’s water tanks. That water was just gravity-fed and not being replenished,” Nattin said.
The lightning strike hit a transformer and electricity then traveled inside the facility, causing a fire that was eventually extinguished by 4 feet of water that had flooded the plant when the controls to the system were knocked offline, according to Nattin. “Their treatment plant suffered a lot of damage,” Nattin said.
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
Crews knew they needed to get Sheridan’s water to the affected customers by connecting Sheridan’s 10-inch line with South Sheridan’s 10-inch line, but finding those water arteries presented its own problem.
“We knew where our line was,” Nattin said. “We just didn’t know exactly where their line was. But David Fitzgerald, our water department supervisor who has been here so long he retired and then came back to work, had a feeling that it was there in front of Aaron’s on Rock Street so we went to work. In trying to find the lines, we broke our own main and had to repair that, but we were able to find the other line and put the two together.”
The Sheridan water system should have no problem supplying water to the areas now served by the other two water associations, Nattin said. The Sheridan system has a capacity of 4 million gallons a day and uses only about a tenth of that.
“So we easily have the capacity to extend our water system to them,” he said. “It won’t be a strain on us to provide water to their 3,000 to 4,000 customers. That said, I am asking our customers to conserve water as our system ramps up. Now would not be the best time to fill up a pool, for instance, or to wash your car or water the grass. Right now we are for sure trying to make sure everyone has water.”
Nattin praised the community spirit that allowed workers to repair and join the water lines.
“Max Hicks, an engineer with McClelland Engineering in Little Rock, lives in the area and he was here all day and until 2:30 in the morning when we finally got done,” Nattin said. “Sheridan Excavating came out with their digging equipment and lights and power tools. Badger Daylighting, a Conway excavation company, has a tool that sucked up all the debris around the pipes allowing us to work. And Scott Hines made two trips to Little Rock to get the parts for what we had to do. It was a crazy day and an amazing joint effort. Without each of them, this would have taken much longer and the consequences would have been much worse. Some people were running out of water and others had run out. It was just a matter of time before they all would have been without water.”
As part of the emergency response, Nattin coordinated with the governor’s office, which sent two National Guard personnel to Sheridan with a refillable 300-gallon water tank, found Monday in the Tractor Supply parking lot. The guardsmen said there had been a steady flow of people driving up to get either a jug of bottled water, donated by Tractor Supply and the water associations, or to fill up their own receptacles from the tank of water.
Louis Baugh, 72, said he heard about the boil order from his daughter.
“My wife and I drink a lot of water, but we don’t have anything to put it in so I just grabbed one of these,” he said, holding a gallon jug.
Chris Harris, deputy director of the Arkansas Rural Water Association, said he estimated it would take several days before the two water associations were ready to lift the boil order.
“Even though Sheridan water is now being pushed into the lines operated by the other two water associations,” he said, “the flow is low and will take time to build pressure and reach all of their customers.”
