Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

The Evarts City Council held a special called meeting on Monday, Nov. 27th, to deal with issues facing the city’s water system, which recently resulted in a four-day water outage due to high turbidity.

Evarts City Clerk Kristi Lamb provided details on the reason for the meeting and the council’s action.

“Over the weekend, we had a water outage,” Lamb said. “We had some high turbidity levels.”

According to the city of Evarts’ social media account, the city had issued a boil water advisory due to the high turbidity.

“We routinely monitor your water for turbidity (cloudiness), states the city’s social media post. “This tells us whether we are effectively filtering the water supply. A water sample taken 11/21/2023 showed turbidity levels of 6.0 turbidity units. This is above the standard of 0.3 turbidity units. Because of these high levels of turbidity, there is an increased chance that the water may contain disease-causing organisms… Turbidity has no health effects. However, turbidity can interfere with disinfection and provide a medium for microbial growth.”

Lamb explained Mayor Eddie Manning, along with the Evarts City Council, decided to declare a state of emergency due to the four-day water outage.

“In the state of emergency, we designated an active (water) engineer just to help us get our profile updated for the water plant or any upcoming grant projects,” Lamb said. “We had a couple of people who were interested; they were at the meeting and spoke to the council.”

She explained that the engineer will only serve as a consultant, and any new water plant project will require the city to utilize a bidding process to contract an engineer.

The council decided to designate Mike Maggard of Sisler Maggard Engineering out of Lexington to consult on the current water issues. Lamp pointed out Maggard is not under contract for any water plant project and would have to participate in the bidding process along with any other interested parties should such a project occur.

“He’s already come over and met with us this morning, so he can start updating our profile with Cumberland Valley ADD to help us obtain funding for a new water plant,” Lamb said.

The council did not address any other business during the special called meeting.