Blaine's water deemed safe again, boil order lifted

Update: 4:40 p.m.| Posted: 1:56 p.m.

A water quality test confirmed that tap water in the city of Blaine is free of contaminants.

City residents had been ordered to boil tap water after the city's water system went down for a couple hours on Sunday morning.

Now that the city has confirmed the water is safe, residents and businesses should flush faucets for about five minutes and clean any equipment connected to the water supplies, said Dan Disrud, an environmental manager with Anoka County.

"It's meant to make sure that nobody has been introduced to water that hasn't been through the testing to show it's safe," Disrud said.

Blaine city officials are still trying to figure out exactly what led to the water outage.

City residents noticed a drop in water pressure starting around 8 a.m. on Sunday. Thousands of homes and businesses in the area lost service completely for a couple of hours. After it was restored, the city issued an order for residents to boil water the for 24 hours as a precaution. That order was lifted late on Monday afternoon.

Schools in the area were closed Monday, including Blaine High School, Roosevelt Middle School and a number of elementary schools.

When the water pressure drops below a certain point, the state advises that people boil their water, said Stew Thornley, health educator with the drinking water program at the Minnesota Department of Health.

It's a precaution in case coliform bacteria or other organisms somehow get into the system.

"It's probably not a high possibility, but from the Department of Health standpoint, we want to make sure that no one gets sick," Thornley said.

The agency records only a handful of water boil orders each year at some of the nearly 7,000 water systems in the state. The majority of those are due to mechanical failure of some sort.

Blaine city officials said originally that the water system's failure was likely due to a software error. But the city and state are investigating exactly what could have caused Sunday's incident.

"The city responded well, they called the state duty officer, who called our on-call engineer, who was able, even on a Sunday, to be working with the city," Thornley said. "It's a big inconvenience but we'd rather put people through that than getting sick."

The Minnesota Department of Health conducts regular testing of drinking water systems across the state.

The city of Blaine's groundwater comes from 16 wells that range from 228 to 741 feet deep, according to the city's annual water report released last year. That report found that no contaminants were found in city waters at levels higher than federal drinking water standards.

Blaine is a city in the northern Twin Cities suburbs, with about 64,000 residents.