Lovington residents across the city may have experienced a loss of water service on Monday after an electrical failure affected the city’s water pressure.
But the loss wasn’t too long as power was restored approximately an hour and 15 minutes later.
The City of Lovington announced Monday afternoon that customers may experience “low to no water pressure” and crews were working on the issue. Crew personnel reportedly identified an electrical failure at a booster station at Chaparral Park. The city also stated crews were working to restore power as “soon as possible” and were working closely with Lea County Electric Co-op (LCEC). It was later resolved around 2:45 p.m.
“We have a power failure at one of our booster stations,” Lovington City Manager James Williams said before it was restored. “We’re working on getting that issued resolved. The power failure also interfered with the backup generator and pumps did not kick on. So, we’re working on getting the power restored. Once, we get power restored, it’ll take about 30 minutes for us to re-fill the water towers and we’ll be good to go as far as restoring service.”
Williams said the issue started around 1:30 p.m. Monday. At about 2:45 p.m., the city stated the booster station’s power was returned.
“Power has been restored to the booster station and pumps are working without any issues and the water towers are filling,” a city update stated. “Pressure should be coming back up in about 30 minutes, with full system pressure at normal levels in 2 hours.”
According to Williams, the service interruption was “pretty much city-wide.”
“What happens is water gets pumped in from the well field from booster one,” he explained. “(The water) Gets pumped into the two large tanks that we have at Chaparral Park. That’s known as booster two and then the pumps at booster two, actually, are responsible for delivering that water out to our three water towers that we have.”
He said the power failure also impacted the “transfer switch” for the backup generator, which led to the pump not “kicking on” and the alarm system to let city personnel know about an issue was also affected.
“It wasn’t until we lost pressure that the issue was identified,” he said. “So, we’re trying to identify what was the cause of the electrical failure and also two: what caused our transfer switch to not function as it was supposed to and number three: why did the communication system not alarm?”
During the situation, the city posted frequent updates on the situation through it’s webpage and social media.