The boil order has been lifted and Greencastle can drink its water once more. As sent out in an email to students, faculty and staff mid-day on Friday, the city of Greencastle’s water was unsafe to drink straight from the tap and residents needed to boil all drinking water until the problem could be solved.
On Friday, facilities management sent an email to students, faculty and staff informing Greencastle that its water was unsafe to drink. The city of Greencastle has been working on a series of city water expansion projects to better serve the growing Greencastle population. Over the weekend, water was being drawn from a sandpipe instead of a tank, meaning that the water could have been contaminated by pathogens.
“Water should not be consumed unless boiled; this includes all drinking water consumed from water fountains as well as faucets” said DePauw facilities management in an email to students Friday afternoon.
At the time it was unclear when water would come back, leaving many in the DePauw community in the dark.
“It was a surprise,” said Judy Hastings, barista at Café Roy.
As of mid-day Monday, Café Roy was not able to brew coffee or espresso because the filters on the machines were yet to be checked and cleaned by facilities.
“We were hoping they would be here first thing this morning,” Hastings said, “It’s made a real impact.”
“It made us have to adapt,” said Hub sou chef, Jason Durand. “ We had to follow all the health department and water department’s rules but we were able to overcome that,” he said.
The boil order took the university by surprise. While the city of Greencastle has had the expansion of the new water system planned for some time that involved the changing of the pipes, the university did not have forewarning that there was a potential for the water to be unsafe over the weekend.
In turn, the university scrambled to inform faculty, staff and students of this issue. An email went out to the faculty from Linda Ross at 1:05 p.m. on Friday. A Public Safety alert went out at 1:38 p.m. via email. Students were then notified after 2:00 p.m. in an email from housing and a follow up from Christopher Wells in student life.
“We found out when everyone else did,” Durand said.
For those students who did not have the means to boil their own water in their living unit, mainly those living in the first-year resident halls, two water bottles a person were being handed out at the Hub during the weekend.
These announcements were sent to students via email, but for many there was still a level of uncertainty on the situation.
“It was really confusing,” said first-year Kiara Goodwine. “I didn’t know that the Hub was giving out water,” she said.
Goodwine said that her parents came to visit her for the weekend and brought her clean water, but stresses that not every student had that luxury.
“Some freshmen probably did drink the water,” she said.
The rest of Greencastle felt the impact as well. Starbucks was forced to close for the weekend. Restaurants with fountain drinks gave out cans of soda instead. Don Julio’s and Buffalo Wild Wings were both open but with limitations.
“I wouldn’t say it was easy,” said Tony Mitchel from Myers' Market. “We had to shut down our ice machine and boil our water to do our sanitizing."
As of now the water is clean and the students are able to return to their normal water consumption. This past weekend was an opportunity for the university to prepare its self in case of emergency, to establish a better plan for the future.