McALESTER — When city employee Roy McClaughrey hired on at the city of McAlester, he told his new bosses he didn’t mind getting dirty, if that’s what it took to do the job.

It’s a good thing he didn’t mind, because he got the chance to prove it on Monday.

McLaughrey joined other city employees in scraping a mud-like sludge from the bottom of one of the two clearwells at the McAlester Water Treatment Plant.

“We’re cleaning out the west clearwell,” said City Utilities Director David Medley.

Medley hopes cleaning and flushing the clearwell will help eliminate the discolored water problem that’s been hitting parts of the city.

The sludge on the bottom of the clearwell and also staining the walls is from a buildup of iron and manganese, Medley said.

The two clearwells at the water treatment plant are huge concrete structures capable of storing 1 million gallons each of treated water.

Until last Friday, the west clearwell currently being cleaned had been used to store treated water before the city piped it on for use by the city’s water customers.

Before the city employees were allowed to descend into the clearwell on Monday, city personnel had to test the air inside the structure.

“We checked the air to make sure it’s quality air,” Medley said.

With most of the water already drained into a nearby lagoon, city employees descended a long ladder to enter the clearwell.

Although much of the sludge had already been loosened by draining and flushing the clearwell, the final steps had to be done by hand.

Wearing wading boots, city employees used high-pressure hoses, squeegees and even shovels to scrape the bottom of the clearwell, encrusted with a sludge-like material. The water and sludge were approximately six inches deep at some points, and a little deeper or shallower in others.

The clearwell is similar to a huge warehouse with a number of rooms, or chambers. With only one drain on the side of the clearwell closest to a nearby lagoon, the build-up scraped from the clearwell’s bottom had to be manually moved from chamber to chamber to finally reach the drain — a tedious process.

Since the clearwell had been designed to hold water, once the workers moved very far from the entrance leading to the top, they were in darkness. That’s why they’ve been outfitted with lights they can wear on their heads, not unlike coal miners.

“It’s dark; it’s like a mine,” city employee David Bridgeman said as he climbed out of the structure.

City employee Bobby Ives fastened on a pair of hip waders as he prepared to re-enter the clearwell to continue the cleaning process.

He said there’s already been an improvement in the city’s water.

“I talked to people in town. They said it’s getting better,” Ives said.

Did he tell them he’s personally been helping on the project?

“I told them I work for the city, so I’m partly responsible for it,” he said.

Asked if the sludge is difficult to remove from the clearwell, Ives said “Since it’s been soaking so long, it just comes right up.”

Medley said the city has been using the west clearwell only — the one currently being cleaned — for several years, because of a leak in the bottom of the east clearwell. At one time, 150 gallons a minutes had been pouring from the leak, although, for reasons no one could explain, the leak did not seem as bad on Monday.

On Friday, city employees were told that laboratory tests had been approved which gave them the go-ahead to start using the recently-cleaned east clearwell. That meant city employees could shut down, drain and clean the west clearwell — which hasn’t been cleaned in an estimated five-to-seven years.

“It’s amazing how dirty this can get over the years,” Medley said, attributing the sludge to a build-up of sediment resulting from the iron and manganese in the system.

While the city’s problems with discolored water have been ongoing for some time, they’ve been especially pronounced this summer. As far as anyone knows, it’s never been city-wide at once, but has hit different areas at different times.

So far, the leak in the reactivated east clearwell seemed to be losing water at the same rate as it had last Friday — enough to soak the ground and flow downhill to the edge of a road, leaving a wet trail behind it.

Medley indicated that the city can live with the leak for the time being.

“That’s a small price to pay to get this problem solved,” he said.



Contact James Beaty at jbeaty@mcalesternews.com.