Irrigation district manager honored for system rehab work

Kathleen Small, manager of the Pasadena Park Irrigation District, is to be honored today as the state’s No. 1 leak-plugger.

Officially, she’s the state Department of Health’s “Operator of the Year” for leading her staff in a successful campaign to rehabilitate a water system that once leaked enough to fill more than 8 1/2 Valley Mission pools a day.

Small said the district lost nearly a half-gallon of water for every gallon it delivered in summer months in 2002 – a loss of approximately 45 percent.

The leakage was roughly the same during winter months, but because of reduced demand, the loss represented a staggering three gallons for every gallon delivered. Pumps labored to draw a million gallons of water a day from four wells, only to have it sink back into the ground.

Health Department officials credit Small with “team-building management” that helped her overcome “one of the state’s highest leakage rates.”

“That 45 percent, it’s hard to top that,” Small said. “Oh, it was a huge amount of water.”

Consequently, she said, “We’re kind of proud of what we’ve done here.”

She credits the district’s five directors as well as her staff for helping her make “beautiful music” as leader of the “band.”

“They had to do some creative thinking to cover this,” Small said.

The problem was so bad along Maringo Drive, west of Argonne Road, that relatively warm water would melt snow.

“You could follow our water pipe right down the road because that was where it was leaking,” Small said.

District records indicated the line – consisting of cast-iron pipes with lead-sealed joints – was installed sometime before 1946.

“It was leaking at every joint,” Small said. “Basically, it was a soaker hose – a big one.”

In other areas, the district had crumbling cement pipes or cracked “dipped-and-wrapped” steel pipes that developed rust holes where rocks gouged their protective coating.

“When we realized we had $5 million worth of pipe to replace, we were all a little green,” Small said.

As in green around the gills.

That was in 2002, when the leakage peaked.

Since then, the district has reduced the leakage by some 820,000 gallons a day – to approximately 12 percent of summer water sales. The goal is to cut the loss to less than 10 percent by the end of 2010, Small said.

The task was daunting for a water district with only six employees, 2,200 connections and 5,500 residents.

“We had 40 years of deferred maintenance,” and lack of records made it difficult to identify needs, Small said. But most of the district’s water mains were installed before 1950.

Formed in 1910 to irrigate farms between Millwood and Peone Prairie, Pasadena Park now has a 95 percent residential customer base. It is bounded on the west by Spokane and on the east by the Arbor Crest Winery.

The district is one of 18 water purveyors that serve both incorporated and unincorporated areas throughout the Spokane Valley.

Small has worked in that milieu for three decades, starting in 1979 as a meter installer and reader for the Moab Irrigation District in the Newman Lake area, where she now serves on the board of directors.

She has managed Pasadena Park Irrigation since 1999.

The state Health Department officials said Small calculated pumping costs and the value of conservation to justify a construction project that so far has cost the water district about $4 million. It was a major undertaking for a district with a $1.6 million annual budget – and a test of faith.

“A lot of this is guesswork because it’s not like power lines,” she said. “You can’t look up on the power pole and see it. We had to take some calculated risk to start this work.”

District officials didn’t know until 2004 that they had won their bet, Small said. She recorded an “enormous drop” in leakage that year, down to 37 percent of the 2002 loss.

The district has now replaced nine of its 23.7 miles of water mains, and plans to replace about three more by the end of 2010.

Small said district directors adopted a three-pronged plan that involved obtaining Health Department loans with interest as low as 1.5 percent, and raising rates enough to repay the loans and build reserves for future maintenance.

Despite the rate increases, Small said the base rate for a typical home is $26.15 a month. As new homes have been built, the district has been able to sell water that used to leak away.

The award Small is to receive today – in the middle of Drinking Water Week – is based not only on Small’s accomplishments at Pasadena Irrigation District but the classes she teaches through the Evergreen Rural Water of Washington and the American Water Works Association.

The most recent of the classes Small has taught in the past three years was titled, “Water Quality Emergencies: What are you going to do when it happens to you?”

A crisis is a rare chance for a water worker to shine.

“We’re kind of the unsung heroes,” Small said. “The only time people really know anything about us is when the shower doesn’t work.”

So Small was “thrilled” that the one-per-year state award is coming to an area where so many small districts toil anonymously to keep the water running.