A long, refreshing story

If life was one long videotape, and the director hit rewind, and your shower water was the star of this movie, it would crawl from the bottom of the tub, get sucked off of your body and through the air like a dozen strings yanked tight, then back into the showerhead, down through the pipes into one of the city’s water mains and straight to a ground-level discharge center where a modicum of water-ammonia solution and chlorine would be ejected. The water would then reverse about 2,000 feet down a well and into a stretch of sand where it would dribble for thousands of years.

This would be the tedious part of the movie.

But then suddenly the water, charting a northeasterly course, would begin its climb back to the surface, slowly recollecting the impurities that layer upon layer of fractured bedrock had expunged. In a stunning climax the water would explode out of the ground near Vicksburg, Miss., and fly skyward toward some lofty rain cloud. And there the movie would end, in the first century A.D.

“The water you drank this morning fell as rainwater around Vicksburg, Miss., about the time of Christ,” says Hays Owen, senior vice president and chief administrative officer for Baton Rouge Water Company. “That’s how long it takes to trickle down through the aquifers and to get purified through the natural process of going through the rock and sand formations.”

In many ways the job Owen and his Baton Rouge Water Co. colleagues have is simple. Drilling down 600 to 2,800 feet anywhere north of the fault line that cuts across College Drive and through BREC’s City Park results in water that is naturally pure and soft. Anything south of that line can be brackish. The aquifers are so deep, Owen says, that no hurricane damage or industry runoff affects our water supply. The long road that ancient rainwater took to reach its underground resting place guaranteed its purification thanks to hundreds or thousands of feet of rock.

In 2007 Men’s Health studied levels of arsenic, lead, coliform bacteria and other contaminates and ranked Baton Rouge’s tap water as the second healthiest in the country, behind only Denver.

As fortunate as Baton Rouge is with this resource, the job the Water Company performs cannot be overstated, especially in the heated months of summer. The most common contributor to midday fatigue or a headache is a mild dehydration. According to studies, the average U.S. citizen uses roughly 80 gallons of water a day, and a major push of the Green movement involves water conservation. Last year James Bond’s enemies in the film Quantum of Solace were eco-terrorists who controlled water as a means of gaining political leverage. Some futurists believe we’ll eventually drive cars fueled by the stuff.

Founded in 1888, Baton Rouge Water Company now serves more than 157,000 customers from 65 wells within the city limits and another 29 throughout the parish. The capacity is far beyond 100 million gallons per day, though the average 24-hour demand is less than half that. The Water Company’s plan calls for an additional two or three wells annually through 2017. “We’ve tried to figure out where the growth is going to be and what size lines to put in the ground in order to get the water to that area and those customers,” Owen says. “We always want more capacity than daily demand in case of emergencies.”

Gustav was one major emergency last fall, but unlike our power, the city never lost water service. Generators kept the wells pumping.

The reason: planning the water company did in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Owen says the company realized it needed a more reliable supply of diesel for its pumps should the city lose power, so they negotiated contracts with three different South Louisiana diesel refineries, and bought their own 18-wheel tanker so they don’t have to wait for deliveries. By comparison, Owen says, the city of Houston lost its water supply last summer after Hurricane Ike.

Daily demand is generally highest at the tail end of the summer, especially if there is a drought like Baton Rouge saw in 2007. As lawns dry out in August, demand climbs, and roughly 75 million gallons pump through the system daily, with each drop monitored and maintained from the Supervisory Control Room in the belly of the Water Company offices on Goodwood Boulevard.

Baton Rouge Water Co. started in 1888, and its first storage stand pipe still stands today next to the Shaw Center for the Arts at Lafayette Park.

Three families control the company: The Witters, the Jordans and the Owens.

The company began service to Ascension Parish in 1994 with 1,730 customers. Today there are 21,500 Ascension customers.

Today the company has 225 employees and six Segway electric scooters for meter readers.

Baton Rouge Water and its subsidiaries supply water to 157,000 customer accounts with an average of 3.5 people per account.

The storage tank on Bluebonnet Boulevard just south of Perkins holds 3 million gallons of water.

Inside, water production manager Dennis McGehee and water quality supervisor Jeff Miller oversee every well site and water tower for the city, including all operations for the East Baton Rouge Parish and Ascension Parish water systems. This is the brain center controlling the water we use, and technicians are on watch 24 hours a day. So precise are these instruments that their regulators can tell when it is halftime in Tiger Stadium because of the spike in water usage from all that flushing. Pressure gauges and on-site alarms, chlorine residuals and flow rates are all monitored and adjusted digitally. Even the large diesel generators at well sites can be turned on and off with the click of a mouse. It’s the modern method of manipulating the planet’s oldest resource.

And Owen has his own way of surveying that resource. The vice president travels a lot, and when he dines out in other cities, he passes on wine, soft drinks and even bottled water. He always orders the city’s tap water just to see what it tastes like.

“The taste I recognize the most is the overpowering amount of chlorine,” Owen says. “I don’t know if that’s the way they operate their system or the amount they have to put in, but to me that’s a telling factor that we’re very fortunate with the water we have. We don’t have to do a lot to it.”