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WATER DEPARTMENT The Mechanic Falls Water Department 2022

2022 brought big changes for us here at the water department. The most significant and by far the most impactful change was the retirement of long-time superintendent Steve French. Steve was here for 35 years, 16 of that as superintendent, with a total of almost 50 years working in the water industry. We cannot thank Steve enough for his dedication over the years; his experience and knowledge will be greatly missed. Along with Steve’s retirement, Ben Limerick, who had been with us for a couple of years moved on leaving us with 2 openings. We hired Derek Turcotte and most recently Matt Tirrell, who are both new to the water world, so if you see them out and about feel free to introduce yourself to them.

The water department was lucky enough to receive almost $40,000 in grant money last year. We were able to install a stand-by generator to replace the 6-cylinder propane motor at the pumping station. When we lose power now, we no longer have to hook the drive shaft up and start the propane motor, the generator automatically comes on and will run the entire place. We received a 50/50 grant for this, amounting to around $17,000. Next, we received a security grant from the state in the amount of $20,000 to replace the gate at the entrance of the pumping station. The new gate has a keypad and door openers to operate it, instead of being locked by a padlock. The 3rd grant we received was through MMA for safety equipment. We received approximately $2,500 for new cones, signs and barricades to protect us when working in the streets. Several other capital improvement projects were completed over year as well. The largest of those were the replacement of the main well pump along with the cleaning of the well screen. After we had scheduled the pump replacement and they had ordered the new pump we had a catastrophic failure with the old pump. The shaft that runs from the pump motor down to the pump snapped while running one night and we could no longer pump water. We had to run off our back-up well until they could install the new pump. Luckily, we already had everything ordered or it could have taken much longer to get the replacement. We learned that we need to have our pumps and wells flow tested on a regular basis as preventative maintenance. We have been working on replacing all of our old (some have 1884 stamped on them) Ludlow hydrants with only two outlets on them since I started here almost 25 years ago. We replaced the one on Clifford St. this year, this brings us down to two remaining in our system, one on Oak St the other on Judson St. We hope to replace those in 2023 and 2024. The lights at both the office and the pump station were all changed over to LED, hopefully this will help a little with our energy bills. We purchased GIS (global information system) software and a GPS unit to input all of our data into one place. We are currently GPS locating all of our water service shut offs so you may see us wandering around on your front lawn. As we do this, we are taking pictures of the location and making sure our records are accurate. We are also finding that many are damaged so we are fixing them as we go along. This will be an on-going project for at least the next few years. Lastly the engineering for the replacement of the water main on Libby Road has started. This main is about 130 years old and runs through the field and woods across Riverside dr. connecting with the main on South Main St. across from Highland

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