Statement direct from Sheldon City Manager Sam Kooiker:
“Let’s start with the question you are asking, and that is “can we take showers and do laundry?” Also, some restaurants also voluntarily closed, and large industrial users such as AGP reduced consumption. The short answer is please do the bare minimum. We are turning a positive corner, yet we ask that you continue to conserve as much as possible and try to avoid putting water down the drain. Yesterday 6/22, between the sewer plant and bypassing, we moved 12-15m gallons of water. This is epic considering we normally process 800,000g of effluent daily. This doesn’t include all the popped manhole covers where water was just coming out. Reminder to please make sure sumps and roof drains are not connected to the sewer.
The Sheldon Fire Company performed a home-saving task yesterday and last night with helping on 11th St by Tanks and by Lewis Drug. Without them, we may have had hundreds of more homes with back-up.
Six customers are without water due to the Floyd River’s impact on our 10” water line on the north side of Hwy 18 west of Western Ave/McKinley. Today the Public Works Dept, Sheldon’s Farmer’s Market (Dave Vande Brake) and Sheldon Fire Co will undertake one of the more innovative projects in City history by using 3,000 feet of fire transfer hose provided by partnering fire departments to reconnect water to the Sheldon Motel, NW Iowa Community College, Tradewinds Apartments, and several homes. Three are in City Limits, three are not. All six are important to us. One of these homes has more than 10 people from Rock Valley who lost their homes, so while this may seem like a small project, it is time and resource intensive and a crucial project. We do not know when it will be energized but we home by tomorrow. These 6 customers will be on a boil advisory. To be clear the rest of Sheldon is NOT on a boil advisory, but we ask you to PLEASE continue to conserve water.
Just a reminder of our emergency City Council meeting at 4:30p tomorrow, Monday, 6/24. Agenda and updates can be found at www.sheldoniowa.gov.”
