How the City of Idanha is fixing a leak that costs it 70,000 gallons of water a day

IDANHA – Construction crews digging up the roads and culverts the past few months have found a lot: rusted out water distribution lines that predate the city and water mains constructed from wood.

For decades, those in charge of Idanha have known their water system was one of the most wasteful in Oregon, but didn’t have the means to do anything about it.

Idanha loses almost 90 percent of the water the city treats through a plethora of leaks in its antiquated system.

“We’re making 80,000 a gallons a day so the city can use 10,000. That’s how much loss we got in the system,” public works director Bob Bruce said.

Idanha is in the process of completely rebuilding its entire water filtration and distribution system.

The city received $1.7 million from the Oregon Community Development Block Grant program and broke ground on its ambitious new water system in January.

The grant money was a matter of Idanha’s survival.

“We knew that we had to do something a long time ago because it was just bubble gum and bailing wire holding together the system,” said city councilor Jeff Yohe. “Eventually it’s going to give and what are you going to do?

“The city dies, essentially.”

Porous water system

The need for fixes has long been known.

Pieces of Idanha’s water system have been in place since the 1930s – the city was incorporated in 1949 – and have received piecemeal updates along the way, most recently in 1976 and 1998.

What hasn’t helped the problem is there are no maps of the current water distribution system, and the only way to find it is to dig.

For decades, the city has been chasing down the numerous leaks in its water system, but there are so many it was futile.

“The hard part about it is you can’t find them until they surface and this ground’s real porous,” Bruce said.  

A 2013 report from the Oregon Department of Health showed Idanha had six significant deficiencies in its water system.

In 2014, the city received a $35,000 loan from RCAC – a non-profit for rural communities that receives funding from the U.S. Treasury and Department of Agriculture – to deal with immediate repairs to bring the system up to code.

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The city had to approve a rate increase in 2014 to secure the $35,000 loan. The average cost per 5,000 gallons used was increased to $41.81, compared with $22.84 in Salem.

But in February 2016, a water main broke after heavy snow and freezing temperatures.

“It was spraying water up on the highway on the bridge, so we would have been responsible for any accidents that would have happened on this little bridge down here,” said city recorder Rebecca Oildale.

After the city cleared the snow, Emery & Son’s Construction fixed the water main and allowed the city to make payments until it was able to obtain a $17,846 grant through the Emergency Community Water Assistance Grant Program to pay for that repair.

Wooden water mains

Cities used wood for construction of water mains as early as the 13th century and that form of infrastructure was installed in some locations as recently as the 1920s.

Wood planks were connected in a circle, the exterior wrapped in metal and coated in tar to transport water.

Wooden water mains have been uncovered in recent years in places like Portland, Philadelphia and Detroit, Michigan, but the difference between the wood water mains in most cities and the ones in Idanha is a few were still being used in Idanha.

“There was a lot in use in ‘98,” Bruce said. “They’ve been finding that when they dig the old one up.

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“The next guy, you know, 100 years from now will be digging up our pipe and going, 'What’s this?'”

Idanha is the eastern-most city in Marion County, and the town straddles the North Santiam River with half of the town in Linn County. It draws its water from Rainbow Creek and Mud Puppy Creek, which, as the name suggests, is the more dirty source.

At its peak, Idanha had a population of over 400 when logging was at its height, but since the mills closed in the 1980s and '90s, that plummeted.

Idanha’s population was estimated at 140 in 2018 by Portland State. That’s not a large tax base from which to draw funds.

Finding money

Yohe said the city applied for a grant to the Oregon Community Development Block Grant program almost a decade ago, but it was rejected since its citizens made too much money.

He said the few people in the city who responded to the 2010 census were of higher income and skewed the true average income.

“It made us look like we were richer than Lincoln City,” Yohe said.

The city undertook another census of its citizens, with funding from the Council of Governments, and its median income dropped to about $25,000 a year.

“Basically what happened at that point is we qualified for the grant,” Yohe said.

The city was awarded the $1.7 million grant in 2018 with $629,000 budgeted for distribution improvements, $75,000 for meters and $554,000 for the treatment plant improvements.

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Construction of the new water distribution system in Idanha is nearly complete. The next phase involves installing new water meters on each house, a few of which are currently without meters.

The current ones are read manually, which becomes a problem when there are feet of snow on the ground in the winter.

“I’ve went around here and read meters and went around shutting meters off, but in the snow I could be off four feet and poking around in the snow for two days trying to find the damn thing,” Yohe said. The final step will be installation of the advanced membrane water filtration system in its current water plant.

With increasing concerns about contaminants in municipal water supplies – and the desire to modernize their filtration systems – cities such as Bend, St. Helens and Gates have installed membrane water filtration systems.

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Though the current water filtration system will be replaced, Idanha will still have three more years of payments on the loan on the current one.

The catch for residents is they’re going to have to pay to have their houses hooked up to the new water system at around $1,000 per home.

The city won’t realize the benefits from its new leak-free water system for some time, but the new one will be a huge leap forward.

“This is definitely a major step in the right direction,” Yohe said.

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bpoehler@StatesmanJournal.com or Twitter.com/bpoehler