Whether youre turning on your faucet in the kitchen of your home, or turning on your sprinkler to water the garden in the city of Astoria, seldom would you think twice about where there water is coming from.

But members of the Astoria City Council found out how important that water source is one recent morning with a tour of the Bear Creek Watershed, located 12 miles east of Astoria in Svensen, on the 3,700 acres the city owns.

I call it a gem, said Astoria Public Works Director Ken Cook. The city has just a total gem of a resource here. And this is how the city gets its water.

Seven communities get their water from the Bear Creek Watershed, including Burnside, John Day and Fernhill. They use the three lakes on the citys property Main Lake, holding 200 million gallons of water; Middle Lake, higher up and feeding the Main Lake with its 52 million gallons; and Wickiup Lake with 59 million gallons.

Basically, its like a big bowl, and it all drains down to here, the dam, Cook said, who called the setup incredible. Its set up so all of the private land drains away from the watershed and everything on the inside of the property line drains down into the watershed. So odds of contamination are minimal.

Cook explained the water system in depth during a recent field trip, with City Engineer Jeff Harrington, Assistant Engineer Cindy Moore and Shop Manager Ken Nelson.

Something new for the city to see

What I want to show you today, Cook told the Council on arrival Sept. 2, is that the water from the filters used to come down and traveled in a pipeline that was strapped to the dam. Then it came across the dam and came down underground and chlorine and fluoride was injected at that point.

It was a very difficult location to have a pipeline, he said of the steep, nearly straight-down, dam side where the pipe was once attached. The brackets were corroding and it was really difficult to maintain it. And it was just not a good solution, and the truth is that that had never been intended to be the main feed.

The pipe became the main feed when the sand-filtration system was installed, because they couldnt put filtered water back into an unfiltered lake, Cook explained. So the old pipe was a back-up plan, one that stuck for several years.

Now, several months and $600,000 later, that old pipeline has been removed and replaced by an underground system.

The water comes down underground through these vaults, said Cook explaining the impressive equipment in the ground. Its a 12 (inch) diameter line now that goes into the city of Astoria.

The pipe is 12 miles long and follows Pipeline Road.

The water users, including Astoria, use an average of 2.5 million gallons per day.

There are 3,900 water meters, 439 fire hydrants and more than 1,000 control valves in the system.

Only two reservoirs are in Astoria, named Reservoir 2 and Reservoir 3. Reservoir 1 is what people always ask about, Cook said, but it is no longer in existence.

After viewing the vaults, the Council was then given a tour of the facility, from the caretaker Fred Mickelsons home on the Main Lake, to the slow-sand filtration system used in four ponds on the property.

Mickelson lives on the property and monitors the watershed, including the waters turbidity levels, tested three times per day.

I work in the watershed eight hours a day, but I am on call 24 hours a day, Mickelson said, who has worked in the watershed for 20 years. I used to get calls quite a bit, before we put the pipeline in from Middle Lake. Now in the winter we just run off of Middle Lake and when the creeks get dirty we dont get an alarm like we used to. There used to be a lot of alarms in the middle of the night when the creeks would get dirty and Id have to manually change over lakes.

Also monitored are the chlorine residual, pH and fluoride levels, which are tested every day.

Bacteriological content is measured 14 times per month; hardness and alkalinity are monitored once per week, as with algae levels.

Chlorine disinfection by-products, or trihalomethanes, are measured quarterly.

Volatile organic chemicals are monitored once per year.

Mickelson said during the 1996 rainstorms, Astoria was the only city to his knowledge that didnt have to boil their water supply on the West Coast because of the unique system of three lakes, providing enough clean undisturbed water.

Future on the property

Most of the watershed property is made up of trees, some that are better than others for the citys water supply.

Any of the deciduous trees that are up here, Maple, Alder, any of the ones that drop leaves, in the process of decomposition, they create tannic acid and that tannic acid goes into the stream and the filter technology that we have is not capable of filtering that tannic acid, Cook said. The negative affect of that is that we have to up the chlorine because it inhibits the disinfection process during the fall months. So what we try to do is target stands of Alder in terms of removal so that we can keep the volume of leaves down.

If the logging is done in the right way, its compatible with the water quality. In some cases, it can enhance that.

Councilman Peter Roscoe said that although the city may not want to do it, there is a lot of harvestable timber around the watershed.

The small lot blown down during the 2007 storm, for example, was harvested for more than $400,000, and that only made up a small percentage of the acreage. That money went to the capital improvement fund at the city.

I met this week with a company and were exploring carbon credits, Cook said, of a program through the state of Oregon that is driven by the California market. I dont want to be premature and I dont want to throw numbers around

Roscoe interjected, You can make a huge amount of money. This is a huge deal.

Roscoe also added that there is a pilot program in Vernonia.

Cook added that an investors group is putting together a proposal for the city of Astoria.

The possibility of getting windmills on the citys property is also being looked into, according to Cook, who said the only other acreage owned by the city outside of the city limits in Youngs River Falls and the cemetery property in Warrenton.

The windmills would be up on Wickiup Ridge, Cook said.

Other hydro-electric options are also being pursued, according to the citys Assistant Engineer Cindy Moore, which would not only pay for the system but also make a profit for the city.

Almost all of the pipes use gravity to move the water, and the flow generates electricity.

This flows like this, Cook said of the rushing sound in the pipe, 24 hours a day, seven days a week and right now its just going to waste. So were going to try to capture that.