I
n the fall of 1911, President Taft was presented with a case of bottled water from the Iola Booster Club.
Attached to each bottle was a label: “This bottle contains Neosho river water, nothing else. … We use this water on our streets, lawns, tables. We drink it, and we vouch for its purity. Please try it.”
It’s not recorded whether the plump Republican sipped from the gift before his train chugged off, but the gist of the label’s message is as true today as then: The Neosho River, still the area’s main source of drinking water, is, quite literally, a part of the people who live here.
On Thursday, the Iola Public Library hosted a panel discussion devoted to the Neosho River. The event featured Toby Ross, superintendent of the Iola Water Plant; Susan Stover of the Kansas Geological Survey; Allen Community College biology instructor, Travis Robb; and Register reporter and self-described “river rat,” Bob Johnson.
It’s hard to confirm the Booster Club’s claims a hundred years out, but if the 27th president were reinflated today, he’d be unwise to pass up a glass of what, according to Ross, industry experts have recently voted the “best tasting water in Kansas.”
But it wasn’t always the case, averred Bob Johnson. “The early water that was purified often came out of the tap murky and had fish scales in it, and pieces of weed.” Not to mention the many cases of typhoid fever, said Johnson, “which probably came from bad water.”
Turning bad water good
Ross relayed in detail today’s methods for transforming the brown broth of the Neosho — an Osage word meaning, unbelievably, “clear water” — into the award-winning beverage that wets your lips today:
First, water is pumped from the Neosho River into a high-powered “clarifier” at the plant, which acts as “a basic cleanup” mechanism meant to eliminate most of the water’s initial turbidity. From there, it moves through the “ozone system,” which is the plant’s main disinfectant, “and which takes care of taste and odors.” Next, it’s on to “lime softening,” which reduces the water’s natural hardness. From there, the stuff is blasted with CO2, which lowers the pH of the water, before traveling into one of four “dual media filters,” each consisting of a layer of anthracite coal over a layer of sand through which the water filters. At this point, it sluices into an underground “transfer well,” where fluoride, chlorine and ammonia sulfate are added to the mix. Nearing the end of its journey, it moves to the “clear well…which is basically a million gallons of storage and a pump that pumps it to town.” Finally, it is hurled through 70 miles of municipal water mains and into the city’s three water towers,” and, from there, to your cup.
The easy symmetry of this process, of course, depends on the general health of the Neosho River, and the general health of the Neosho River depends in large part on the efficient functioning of the John Redmond Dam.
Just do the dam dredging
Discussion of the upstream dam’s impending dredging project — which aims to remove 3 million cubic yards of sediment from the bed of the John Redmond reservoir — was the focus of much of geologist Stover’s talk.
“The fate of artificial reservoirs in our state is to fill up with mud. John Redmond had a 50-year design-life, because we know it’s going to fill up with sediment. …That storage space is every bit as important as our highways. It is infrastructure that we have to maintain. Sixty percent of the state’s population relies on state-owned storage from these reservoirs’ public water supply, and two-thirds of our electrical generation relies on it.”
But, as with other infrastructure in the state of Kansas, funding for maintaining reservoirs like John Redmond has shriveled in recent years.
Nearly three decades earlier, the Kansas Water Office committed $20 million to the project. However, explained Stover, “for the last five years, we have not gotten the full amount [promised].”
Given the arid revenue forecasts for the state, a legislative panel was convened last Friday with the goal of “figuring out how, if this is the new normal — that is, if we can no longer rely on getting our $8 million a year from the state general fund and lottery fund — then how are we going to pay for keeping our reservoirs clean.”
