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Grace Hallowell:

What’s Up College Station? I’m Grace Hallowell and I’m joined once again today by Jennifer Nations, the water chick from Water Services. Hi Jennifer.

Jennifer Nations:

Hi.

Grace Hallowell:

It is going into your busy season here.

Jennifer Nations:

Yes.

Grace Hallowell:

It’s hard to believe Spring is here already.

Jennifer Nations:

I know.

Grace Hallowell:

Although, today it doesn’t feel like it. It’s pretty cold out there, but it is a good reminder that we need to start thinking about our irrigation systems in our home. Let’s share some tips on what we need to do to get everything set for the spring and summer season.

Jennifer Nations:

If you follow water conservation practices and you only water when needed, you probably haven’t irrigated since last November, although, a lot of people have been watering since before Valentine’s Day. I’m looking at you people, but yeah, if you turn your water off, it’s tend to turn it back on, go through your sprinkler system zone by zone. Just turn it on, make sure that everything is working properly, make sure there’s no broken or misdirected sprinkler heads. Make sure that you didn’t have any pipes freeze over the winter or crack or something like that. That’s like step one.

Grace Hallowell:

Yes, and then water services offers. If you’re not sure if you’re unfamiliar or new to having an irrigation system, you guys do free checkups?

Jennifer Nations:

Yes, we do. I do free landscape irrigation checkups, and I’ve had a few requests for those come in already. If you’ve asked for one of those and you haven’t heard back, be patient. I’m going to get to everybody. Yeah, ideally the ideal irrigation checkup customer is somebody who doesn’t really understand how their system works and they are maybe programming it to run too often. I can come in and show them, look, when you were watering four times every day and you had these long run times, that was causing you to use this many thousands of gallons every time you ran your system. Oftentimes, people just don’t know how long to run a zone or they don’t know what the different types of sprinkler heads are and I can help them with that too. Correct,

Grace Hallowell:

Yes. Now you don’t do any repairs, but you can recommend if something needs repaired.

Jennifer Nations:

Yes. If something needs repair, I’ll write it down on the inspection form and then I give people a list of licensed irrigators. It’s just irrigators that I know happen to have the proper licensing from TCEQ. It’s not like a recommended endorsement or anything. If someone is not on the list, but they are a licensed irrigator, they can contact me and I’ll put them on the list, but it’s not like a Good Housekeeping seal of approval or anything.

Grace Hallowell:

Right, and the main reason for this is our summers get very hot. The last few summers, the drought season has kind of been exponential. We want to try and conserve wherever we can before it gets to a point where we need to put those restrictions in place again.

Jennifer Nations:

Yeah. We did do that for the first time ever. Last August, we put in our stage one of our drought contingency plan, and we told people, you can only water on this day during these hours. It was still a really generous window for irrigation. It was just trying to limit how often people water, because sometimes people water every single day and they don’t need to, or they’ll water four times a week and they don’t need to. When we get up to pumping 27 million gallons of water a day, that’s too much and that’s just not sustainable. We have to remember that College Station is pumping from the Carrizo-Wilcox aquifer, so is Texas A&M, so is Bryan. Then it’s a huge aquifer that covers the whole state, and so there’s other areas that are also pumping. If everybody is just irrigating with abandon, then that puts stress on the aquifer and that is our only source of water.

Grace Hallowell:

Correct.

Jennifer Nations:

Yeah.

Grace Hallowell:

The contingency plan brings up a good point ’cause you guys are working on our presentation to counsel for the next one. What can people do if they feel like there needs to be something added to the plan?

Jennifer Nations:

Yeah, that’s a great question. We’ve got two tools in our toolbox. The drought contingency plan is our emergency management tool. That keeps the system running in an emergency condition, which is a drought, extreme water demand. Then we also have the water conservation plan, which is long-term best management practices to incentivize water conservation and just do responsible use of our water resources. If there was anything that was just unmanageable last summer, let’s say that there was a business who could not comply with the watering restrictions and we had a few call in and say, “Look, I can’t water on these days, but we can cut back and we can water this way.” I mean, that’s fine. If there was something that customers saw in another city and they said, “Gosh, I wish College Station had X to incentivize water conservation,” let me know. Let your city council person know. I want to hear back, these are two plans that are required to be updated every five years, but we want them to be something that reflects what’s best for the water utility and something that helps our community.

Grace Hallowell:

Right, and the best way to do that is to get involved. There are a couple different learning opportunities coming up to learn more, starting with the Seminar Supper, which happens here at City Hall. You’ll be the guest speaker. Talk a little bit about that one.

Jennifer Nations:

Yeah, I love the title that they came up with for it. I said, “Just come up with whatever title you want.” It’s Preserving Your Liquid Gold and water resources really are liquid gold. I’m going to go over the differences between the two plans and the similarities and talk about what goes into them, talk about how they’re updated, how often they’re updated, and then what that means for the customer. For example, if we go into stage one, what does that mean for us and what does stage one mean for someone else? What does something like water loss reporting mean? That’s one of the tools in our water conservation plan.

We have other tools like universal metering, irrigation checkups. I’ll talk about all the different tools that we have for that. Then just talk about how we can stay out of our water emergencies. We went into stage one last summer. We do have stage one, stage two. I think the next plan, we’ll have four stages so that there’s going to be a little bit more flexibility in between, but it should be known that when you get into the later drought stages, those are pretty extreme. And we really, really need people to comply with whatever is requested so that we can maintain the health of the water system.

Grace Hallowell:

Right, and if you’d like to attend that event, you can email neighborhood services at Cstx.gov to preserve your spot. You’ll learn a lot, have a yummy dinner. It’ll be a good time. Then another event, which I think is the first one that we’re doing, is our Fix-A-Leak workshop at the Gary Halter Nature Center. I know I’m a recent homeowner, I know nothing. I try my best to learn, but there’s some things that I just don’t know that are above my head. Especially if I ever had a water leak, I don’t think I would know the first thing of what to do or even how to check that if something’s leaking. What can people expect from this event?

Jennifer Nations:

The theme for Fix-A-Leak week is a fixture flapper, which is, it refers to your toilet flapper and Fix-A-Leak Week is a educational week put out by the EPA WaterSense Program. College Station is a promotional partner of EPA WaterSense, and it’s a conservation program from EPA, and they have lots of facts and figures and tools, but they have some guidelines for how to repair toilet flappers. The toilet flapper is the thing that when you flush the toilet, it lifts up in the toilet and it lets all of that water from the tank go into the bowl. I’ll pass out some little toilet tank leak detector tablets. They’re little dye tablets, and you put one in the tank and don’t flush. Then if any of that dye goes into the bowl, then you have a leak in your … A lot of times the water is just seeping by the flapper and those can really drive up your water bill.

I’ve seen on multiple on occasions people have water bills of 90 to 100,000 gallons just from-

Grace Hallowell:

Wow.

Jennifer Nations:

Yeah, it’s amazing. Sometimes it’s the phantom flush, like when the toilet is flushing at two o’clock in the morning or something. Other times it’s just, you might look at the bowl and see a little bit of movement in the water. That’s just the water trickling past the flapper and it wastes so much. It’s a relatively simple repair. That’s one thing that you can do. I’ll also talk about how to read your water meter and see if there is water going through the meter when you think that maybe there should not be water going through the meter. I’ll talk about how to look for leaks in your sprinkler system. Sometimes if you have a leaking sprinkler head, you’re only going to see that leak when the system is running. It’s a good idea to turn it on and have eyes on your sprinkler system once or twice a month. I’ll talk about how to fix those too.

Grace Hallowell:

Remind me when that is, the date and time.

Jennifer Nations:

That’s Friday, March 22nd, which is also World Water Day.

Grace Hallowell:

Yes.

Jennifer Nations:

It’s going to be 12 to one at the Gary Halter Nature Center. It’s a brown bag lunch and learn-type thing.

Grace Hallowell:

Thank you so much, Jennifer.

Jennifer Nations:

You’re welcome.

Grace Hallowell:

It’s always fun having you here. If people have any questions or want to know more, where can they find out more?

Jennifer Nations:

They can just email me, JNations@Cstx.gov.

Grace Hallowell:

Or cstx.gov/water.

Jennifer Nations:

Yep.

Grace Hallowell:

It’s a lot of great resources there.

Jennifer Nations:

Yeah.

Grace Hallowell:

Thank you for joining me again.

Jennifer Nations:

Thanks for having me.

Grace Hallowell:

And that’s What’s Up.

What’s Up College Station Archive