EWEB Commissioners Work Session: October 21, 2025 скачать в хорошем качестве

EWEB Commissioners Work Session: October 21, 2025

Second Source Willamette Treatment Plant Project Update BACKGROUND The Eugene Water & Electric Board (EWEB) is one of the largest utilities in the Pacific Northwest that relies on a single source of supply to provide potable, emergency, and fire suppression water to nearly 200,000 customers. Having a single source of water puts the community at extreme risk of experiencing an extended water outage due to a natural disaster like a wildfire or earthquake, chemical spill on the river, equipment failure, or water quality issue in the McKenzie River which could cut off the community’s access to water. This is the Water Utility’s single biggest risk to accomplishing EWEB’s core values: • Safety: Loss of a water supply would threaten our customers’ access to safe drinking water resulting in a potential loss of life. Medical and critical care facilities could struggle to maintain patient health and services in a water emergency. Emergency wells could mitigate some impacts but are not practical and available for all members or our community such as the elderly or those with disabilities. Depressurization of the water system could hinder the ability of Emergency Personnel to respond to fires and other emergencies. • Reliability: An interruption in EWEB’s water supply could do lasting harm to EWEB’s reputation of being a reliable provider of safe drinking water in our community. • Affordability: Responding to a loss of our water source could be very expensive and result in regulatory mandates that would be less strategic or efficient than addressing • Environmental Stewardship: Strategically investing in a second source of supply can have a net positive impact on the local environment and provide an opportunity to expand EWEB’s successful watershed protection efforts to a larger watershed. • Community/Culture: A second source of supply is the most effective way to protect all members of our community including those who are disadvantaged or who are less able to prepare for emergencies such as students, the unhoused, senior citizens, etc. Without water, there will be significant impacts to the economic health of the community, medical offices will need to shut down affecting the community’s public health, there will be no (or severely limited) water to fight fires and flush toilets, and the overall vitality of the community will be affected. Disasters are becoming more common, and Hayden Bridge has been in continuous service for 75 years, which is putting the utility at a greater risk than ever before of being unable to deliver water. Hayden Bridge was designed for known disasters 75 years ago and is inadequate to deal with anticipated extreme weather, fire, and earthquakes. A significant amount of work has been done at the plant to protect EWEB from losing the water supply, however, it is difficult to upgrade some of the most critical processes with the need to keep the plant in continuous operation. Efforts to develop a second source of water and construct a redundant treatment plant with capacities ranging from 10 MGD to 30 MGD have been attempted since the 1960s. Options for regionalization, developing groundwater, building a second intake and plant on the McKenzie River and developing EWEB’s water rights on the Willamette will be discussed in detail in the following sections.