Problems with lower water pressure in Whiteland were caused by a water tower losing power last week.
Town officials notified residents on Monday that they may experience low water pressure due to a “lack of rain” and overuse of water. Residents were asked to conserve water in the meantime. On Tuesday, the town posted another message on its Facebook page clarifying what caused the water pressure loss over the last few days.
On Thursday, the town’s St. Charles water tower near Whiteland Community High School lost power overnight. The alarm system to notify town employees of the outage did not work, and the outage was not noticed until the next day. The tank was without power for around five hours.
This 300,000-gallon tower is the initial storage tank that receives the direct feed from Indiana American Water, the company where the town purchases water. Because of the loss of power and continued demand on the system during the hot weather, the tower level went down to a low enough elevation to cause the water pressure to drop. The system is recovering and the towers are filling back up to levels where the pressure will be reestablished to normal levels, the post says.
Carmen Young, director of administration, said the water system has not been able to keep up fully with people using water like normal during and after the power outage, especially with the high temperatures outside over the weekend.
After the town’s initial message about the low water pressure, some residents expressed concerns on social media about Whiteland not having enough water capacity to handle the growth of the town, with new houses and industrial buildings.
Young said capacity is not the issue. Whiteland’s water system has a capacity of over 860,000 gallons and there is an average daily use of approximately 420,000 gallons.
