Oktoberfest revelers, book festival goers, marathon runners and parents breathed a sigh of relief in Jackson as alerts hit that the Environmental Protection Agency had lifted a boil water advisory after two days of consecutive tests came back clean.
School is back on for Monday, but the town is still advising residents to take a few precautions. That means running dishwashers on one empty cycle using detergent and “sanitize” function if available, and flush cold water lines for at least one minute starting on low flow.
It’s still unknown at what point the detected E. coli – a highly prevalent but sometimes harmful bacteria – entered the positive sample during monthly checks last week.
The hit came from raw groundwater on a well on the Elk Refuge that had not been called for water in about two weeks, not water that had been through the town’s disinfection system. Repeat tests of the well showed negative results. The isolated, nonrepeated hit, could’ve been a false positive, said Jackson’s Public Works Director Johnny Ziem, or the bacteria could’ve clung to the water bottle used to test.
“So that makes it a little bit harder to figure out,” he said. “We just wanted to be extremely cautious. And the EPA wanted to be extremely cautious.”
Ziem and public works officials will continue to work with the EPA to answer those questions and get the well back up and running as soon as is safely possible.
The order canceled school for a day, disrupted grocery and coffee routines and caused restaurants to adapt or close briefly.
But for Ziem, the best part of the town’s first boil-water notice of such scale was an indication that all the backstops work, from disinfection to public health communication and emergency management.
“In a small community, no matter if it’s an avalanche in the canyon, if it’s a water issue like we had, if it is a snowstorm, we all help each other out. That’s what makes our community so unique, I think, and so special,” he said.
