Ephrata water tower kept offline due to programming issue
Columbia Basin Herald | UPDATED 2 hours, 16 minutes AGO
The Ephrata water tower was not able to be connected Wednesday, like originally planned. According to Public Works Director Rob Harris, the city discovered some programming issues at the booster pump station which will take one to two weeks to solve.
COURTESY PHOTO/CITY OF EPHRATA
EPHRATA — The Ephrata water tower could not be connected yesterday, as originally planned, according to Public Works Directors Rob Harris. Instead, the city will have to wait another one to two weeks for some programming issues to be fixed.
“We took off with the notion today that we were going to be able to get it all on by the end of the day, to open valves up,” Harris said at the Wednesday night council meeting. “We went to start the booster pump station, and we had a setback – we are missing a little bit of programming on some (Programmable Logic Controller).”
Harris said the reservoir is ready to go online; however, there is no system in place to keep it full. He said the booster pump station doesn’t have the “logic” to figure out what it is supposed to do with the water pressure.
“We can start it, and it will run, but it doesn’t know what it is looking at or what to do,” Harris said. “It will just sit there and doesn’t know how to ramp up pressure or ramp down pressure."
Harris said this is a minor issue and should be resolved in the next couple of weeks. Public works have already begun working on programming.
“We are already working on some programming issues,” Harris said. “It is going to move along fairly quickly. We are hoping to be able to have the whole thing back and online in the next week or the week after. It’s not a big hurdle; it’s not a big deal. It was just a minor issue, in a nutshell.”