All's well that ends well

COEUR d’ALENE — The hot and dry weather last month that pushed the city’s wells to capacity has officials more fervently hunting for a new well site.

The city pumped 41 million gallons of water Aug. 3, just a few million gallons shy of its 44 million gallon daily limit.

And although its 10 wells hummed quietly without interruption last month as mists of spray greened the lawns around Coeur d’Alene, water superintendent Terry Pickel and his staff were faced with an anomaly.

The city had never pumped so much water in one day.

Despite the irregularity, Pickel said, his department is on track for a new well slated to be drilled somewhere between 2018 and 2020, he said.

“We’re still there,” he said. “We’re just pumping a little harder than we thought.”

The city had considered a well site on the 600 block of West Neider Avenue, but a test well showed underground sand and silt, which impedes water flow and requires a filter.

At Tuesday’s City Council meeting, Pickel recommended surplusing the .82-acre property, which is valued around $45,000. Instead, the city has tapped a site the city owns on Huetter Road at the intersection of Big Sky Drive.

“We’re looking at other sites, to do test wells,” he said. “If things keep going the way they are going, we’ll be out of our capacity here shortly.”

Pickel proposed adding a 2,000-gallon-per-minute booster station to a well near Best Avenue.

Dedicating property for well sites has become more difficult as the city grows, Pickle said. Because it lies near the far northwest edge of the town, the Huetter site could make pumping a challenge.

The city pumps water from the Rathdrum Prairie Aquifer, an underground river that daily carries an estimated 600 million gallons of water from beneath Lake Pend Oreille to Spokane.

The city on average pumps seven million gallons from the aquifer in winter using two wells and usually peaks around 32 million gallons per day from 10 wells in summer.

“We’ve been inching up slowly,” Pickel said.

During the 2015 to 2016 fiscal year the city pumped more than four billion gallons from the aquifer.

New construction that includes irrigation has pushed the limits of summer use. Pickel said his department is encouraging the use of conservation systems that measure moisture, instead of free-flowing lawn, and green-space irrigation systems. The school district is the city’s biggest water user, he said.

The City Council Tuesday opted to pay for a water rate study to determine what increases are required to fund operations and maintenance along with capitalization fee increases for future projects.

The last study five years ago used projections that did not come to fruition because of a stymied economy, council member Dan Gookin said.

“Yes, this is necessary,” Gookin said. “Their projections were pretty off.”