July 2, 2010

   “People in small communities are usually pretty resilient,” said Martin Hicks, who owns Martin’s Food Center in Merrill. “But I feel sorry for those guys who’ve been moving sprinkler pipe all day and want to come home and take a hot shower.”     

   Most of the city’s 400 households discovered early Wednesday that they didn’t have running water. Officials in Merrill, a community of about 1,000 in southern Klamath County, said the city’s water tank drained Tuesday night, after the water table dropped five to 15 feet and the pipe pumping water out of the town well no longer reached water.

   Bob Bunyard, owner of Klamath Pump Center, today will screw a new pipe on top of the existing pipe so it will reach down 110 feet. Bunyard special ordered an 8-inch column pipe from Chico, Calif., Wednesday, and sent men to pick it up Thursday.  

   Water service should be re-established by Saturday, said City Marshal Brian Bicknell. While Bunyard will finish installation today, the equipment has to be flushed and the water tested and treated before it’s ready for consumption, Bicknell said.  

   Pulling together

   Meanwhile, now that people know what the problem is and how to adapt, “the overall mood has improved,” Bicknell said. “I love our town. As a general rule, people will pull together rather than fall apart.”

   Martin’s Food Center was quiet Thursday morning. The store had plenty of water on hand Wednesday, Hicks said, and received another 630 one-gallon jugs of water Thursday with 210 more on the way, in addition to several pallets of 16-ounce bottled water. Sherm’s Thunderbird Market in Klamath Falls donated 420 jugs of that supply.

   B&D Mobile Support has supplied potable water to residents for free. The disaster relief company has trucks parked at Merrill Elementary School and Merrill City Hall, and had gone through about 15,000 gallons as of Thursday morning.

   Normally during the summer, with watering and irrigation, the city   uses about 500,000 gallons of water daily, Bicknell said. During the winter, it uses about 180,000 gallons daily.

   Incident Commander Monte Keady, of Klamath County Fire District No. 1, said people have been showing up with wagons and buckets, with “some gripe, but mostly everybody’s talking about it. It’s the talk of the town.”

   “I don’t want to minimize the situation, but the world is not much more than 100 years away from hauling your own water,” Keady said. “A lot of people’s parents grew up carrying water from the well.”

   Keady added that the primary focus was getting water to the most vulnerable populations — children, the elderly, and people who can’t leave their homes.  

   Officials also set up 33 portable toilets around town, and Malin Park Swimming Pool and Tulelake-Butte Valley Fairgrounds opened their showers and facilities to Merrill residents.

   Keady said officials are still deciding who will pay for the services being offered, since local resources must be exhausted before the city can tap into state and federal coffers.

   “It’s less a matter of deciding who than deciding what the law will allow,” Keady said. “We have to look at the city budget and see what is available to spend, and we are literally in a different fiscal year today than we were yesterday.”