WHEELING — The city of Wheeling had already scheduled a required public meeting on its source water protection plan prior to the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio — and coincidentally the Feb. 3 environmental incident within the city’s watershed proved the effectiveness of Wheeling’s plan to deal with such an issue.

This week, a drinking water protection public meeting was held in city council chambers. The open session provided a presentation of the city’s Source Water Assessment and Protection program in compliance with West Virginia Senate Bill 373 — also known as The Spill Bill.

Senate Bill 373 requires municipal water utility companies to conduct source water protection planning. The Spill Bill was put into action after the 2014 Elk River spill, in which 10,000 gallons of industrial chemicals were spilled just upstream from the Kanawha County municipal water intake in Charleston.

Hosting the public meeting this week were Wheeling Water Department Superintendent Lori Siburt, Wheeling Water Treatment Plant Manager Mike Rice, Wheeling City Manager Robert Herron, and Kendra Hatcher, environmental scientist with Morgantown-based consultant Downstream Strategies, who developed Wheeling’s plan.

“This meeting was set up prior to the event in East Palestine,” Herron said. “These are proactive things that the city of Wheeling has done and that has been required by the state legislature as well, so this is a proactive approach. This does pre-date what happened recently in Ohio.”

Hatcher said work on this week’s presentation was already well underway in December. The city’s initial management plan for any potential contamination event was put into place in 2016 in the wake of The Spill Bill. Updates are due every three years, Hatcher noted, explaining that an update was given in 2019 and the next update is due by March 1.

“Every time that we do an update, we have to have a public meeting,” Hatcher said. “As a public water utility, you don’t have much control over what’s going in. You can’t really stop a contamination event — but how can you plan to limit the impact?”

Hatcher broke down the protocols contained in the plan, which considers the entire area of the source water that enters the water intake not just at the river, but well into the entire watershed.

“The city of Wheeling watershed is huge,” she said. “The watershed’s size is almost 25,000 square miles upstream from the intake. That’s a lot of area to cover.”

The entire watershed source water protection area reaches northeast Ohio where East Palestine is situated, as well as areas of southeastern West Virginia in the Appalachian Mountains, a sizable chunk of Western Pennsylvania, and a portion of Southwestern New York state. The area nearly reaches Lake Erie, but Hatcher explained that there are more specific areas of concern in the source water protection plan.

“Something that happens way south of Morgantown generally is not super relevant to Wheeling,” she said. “By the time it gets here, something that’s happened that far away is not super important. So we want to focus on the area closest to the intake.”

The plan has protocols for the “Zone of Critical Concern,” which encompasses all water sources that are within five hours or less of travel time from the city’s river intake. These water sources include the Ohio River and and its tributaries upstream from the intake. There is also a “Zone of Peripheral Concern,” which extends to everything within a 10-hour travel time or less from the site where Wheeling draws its raw water. This zone reaches as far north as the East Liverpool, Ohio area.

The Ohio train derailment that has gripped the nation’s attention with concerns over water and air contamination earlier this month is outside of these key zones. However, the event still occurred within the greater watershed area, and the city’s potential contamination plan was put into action.

A key part of the plan centers around communication with key entities and with the public, as well as testing and other proactive, precautionary measures.

“When we have an event like East Palestine, there’s a lot of information floating around — some true and some not-so-true,” Hatcher said.

Siburt explained that the city water department was able to use a Gas Chromatography Mass Spectrometer to test for chemicals in the water following the spill in East Palestine. The department shut down its primary water intakes in the river for eight hours and tapped into its seven freshwater wells as a backup. Water samples are typically taken three times a day, but following the incident upriver, testing was increased.

“We took samples every two hours — samples at the river bank along with intake samples, and finished water, tap water,” Siburt said, noting that there was a trace amount of a chemical detected for a brief period during the testing that followed the spill. “We saw some butyl acrylate in the river. We were able to deal with it in our treatment at our intake. We did not see any odd chemical of any kind — butyl acrylate, vinyl chloride or any of that stuff — in our tap water. We feel confident that we have no issues at our plant, and that was part of this whole plan. We were able to deal with it.”

Siburt said the water department has not detected any odd chemicals again in the raw river water since the early afternoon of Feb. 9.

“It’s long passed us,” she said. “And we’ve had a lot of phone calls, and we’ve explained it the best we can.”

The water superintendent noted that it was an interesting coincidence that the group was putting the presentation together about the water protection plan right when the East Palestine event occurred. Constant communication with officials in Ohio and other entities affected by the incident proved to be a vital part of handling the high-profile situation, officials said.

Herron noted that billions of gallons of water travel past the Wheeling Water Treatment Plant in Warwood every day. Officials added that in the days following the train derailment incident, the river was flowing at up to two miles per hour — which is relatively fast.

The source water protection plan can address situations like the recent spill and many other potentially concerning incidents. Hatcher noted that the Wheeling Water Department serves about 30,000 customers directly, as well as 16,000 bulk water purchasers — and everyone depends on the availability of clean water.

With the city’s backup wells and water storage tanks, Wheeling is prepared for alternative water sourcing in case such an incident would occur even closer to the intake.

“Wheeling is in a pretty good position to have four to six days of backup water in the event that something were to happen,” Hatcher said.