MILWAUKEE – A boil water advisory in South Milwaukee has expired as the city declares that the water supply is clean and safe for consumption.
Jackie Ove, the Public Health Administrator for the City of South Milwaukee, tells WTMJ the issues started last week during a major storm.
“There was some damage at the plant, some electrical surge from the storm, and throughout the week they had had repairs being done,” Ove said.
“They had had it repaired but there was still some work that had to be done. They were continuing that work and for some reason we had another mechanical issue and the water pressure dropped.”
Once that water pressure dropped, creating an environment where bacteria could survive, Ove says the water was flushed and a back-up supply was brought in from Oak Creek.
“We brought that water back through up to the water tower that we have and were able to get in a repair crew from our water utility to work on fixing the mechanical issues,” Ove said.
“Then we were doing lab testing for bacteria in the water for the 48 hours that we had the boil water advisory, and all of those tests came back negative, so we were able to lift the advisory today [Tuesday} at 11:00 a.m.”
Ove says the city has gone through this before so they were prepared and ready to handle the situation immediately.
“In 2010 the city also experienced a water emergency when we had our main water pipe break, so that was a time when we issued a ‘do not consume’ water order, and we had a similar situation where we provided water to the residents of our municipality, and so we had all of those plans still in place and we could pull those plans from our Emergency Operations Plan and put them into place,” Ove said.
