Ames residents who are concerned about the quality of their drinking water after the recent torrent of rain storms don’t have as much to worry about as people in other Iowa cities.

Last weekend, customers of the Rathbun Regional Water Association were told that they could resume drinking their water without boiling it. Customers in the city of Elliott in Montgomery County were told not to stop boiling their drinking water until 3:25 p.m. Tuesday.

Rathbun residents had their ban instituted because the pumps and filtration system for sewage in their area were overwhelmed by rainwater runoff and a release of raw sewage into the drinking supply. The citizens of Elliot had problems with two separate sewer lines bursting and were told to boil their water for safety reasons.

The city of Ames actually benefited from the recent influx of rain because it was on the verge of having to institute water rationing.

Roy Ney, senior construction engineer in the Drinking Water Program at the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, said that in terms of infrastructure needs, Iowa is actually on top of its game. Every four years, a national infrastructure needs survey is conducted. Currently, Iowa is working on the 2007 survey. While those results will not be finalized until about 2009, the most current survey was published in 2003.

“When a needs survey is conducted, what is looked at is what is needed over the next 20 years. So it’s a fairly long time frame we’re looking at,” Ney said.

Ney said most of the water systems in Iowa are 75 to 80 years old, or older. According to the 2003 needs survey, there were about $276.8 billion worth of infrastructure needs nationally and Iowa comprised about 1 percent of those needs, with $3.46 billion worth of needs.

“We don’t really know how our numbers are compared to the national number at this point,” Ney said.

Ney did emphasize, however, that one of the reasons Iowa’s needs survey takes so long is that federal funding is dependent upon the state that needs the most updating, so Iowa focuses on doing a very comprehensive survey to get the maximum amount of federal funding. However, federal funding isn’t enough to cover the cost of all of the needs that are assessed. When it comes to funding these repairs, the state and its individual cities work out loan programs that end up with cities prioritizing their needs.

“One thing that Iowa does is that we end up leveraging it so that we can get loans that we can give out more money than the grant money we get,” Ney said.

The state gives out low-interest loans to help individual municipalities pay for needed repairs. After so many years of getting money from the federal government and loaning it to individual areas and receiving it back with interest, the whole thing basically becomes a revolving loan program, Ney said.

When it comes to flooding situations like Rathbun, most of the problem comes less from the facilities that process the water and more from the actual sewer systems themselves. Most cities have two sewer systems that handle surface water runoff and sewage separately. However, when there are crossovers between the sewers, the water treatment plants become overburdened with masses of water that doesn’t necessarily need to be treated as heavily, but ends up overburdening the system nonetheless.

This is when bypasses become an issue, and the normally carefully controlled processed goes awry. Mechanical failures and power outages cause amounts of untreated sewage to be released into rivers and streams, forcing citizens to have to boil their water.

“Iowa State University turned over its water treatment to the city of Ames,” said Dave Miller, director of facilities and utilities at Iowa State. It was determined that it would be more cost-effective to buy water from the city than to update the existing on-campus water treatment facility.

When it comes to bad drainage, however, the university has taken steps to assure that it keeps the strain off of the city during periods of high water.

“We actually went through a rather extensive study to look for cross connects and we eliminated all of those in the late-80s,” Miller said.

Iowa State basically went through a system to check all of their lines to determine where water was crossing. They then eliminated all of the problems and drainage issues to ensure that everything was up to par and that additional pressures were not being added to Ames’ water system.

Miller also said they meet with the city annually and makes sure that there are no problems with capacity. Iowa State has about 8 miles of water drainage systems, 2.6 miles of direct buried steam pipes and 5.3 miles of chilled water piping.

John Dunn, director and representative of Ames Water and Pollution Control, is in the department that controls the wastewater treatment plant and the drinking water.

“Certainly we do see spikes in flow at the plant when it rains. Earlier this spring, in late April, we saw the flows coming into the plant almost triple,” Dunn said.

This problem can be partially blamed on basement sump pumps and some low-laying manholes that ended up being submerged in rain water. Dunn said for an average dry-water flow, the sewage plant handles about 8.5 million gallons of water per day. During flood peaks, it is rated to handle 20.4 million gallons per day. However, in 1993, a sanitary sewer pipe running under the Skunk River burst and the plant was handling upwards of 36 million gallons per day.

“The wastewater plant has a lot of useful capacity left in it. The average for the last calendar year was about 5.5 million gallons a day,” Dunn said.