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Power outage prompts letter to High Point water customers two months later

High Point officials mailed notices last week to water customers to let them know that a January power outage had affected operations at one of the city’s treatment facilities.

The notices to more than 40,000 city customers went out about two months after the incident.

On January 16, the electricity briefly went out at the Ward Water Treatment Plant, but crews quickly got it back on, says High Point Public Works Director Robby Stone.

For a brief period, the chlorine treatment at the plant dipped slightly below the minimum threshold, he says. But by the time the water went out to the public, it had been adequately treated above that level.

The letter led to some calls from concerned residents, Stone says. 

“And we basically just tried to explain to each person exactly what happened and reassure them that the water is safe and we continue to follow guidelines,” he says.

Stone says city officials notified state water quality officials about the outage. The state didn’t require the city to send out a notification to customers, but the federal Environmental Protection Agency mandated it. 

 

Paul Garber is a Winston-Salem native and an award-winning reporter who began his journalism career with an internship at The High Point Enterprise in 1993. He has previously worked at The Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The News and Record of Greensboro and the Winston-Salem Journal, where he was the newspaper's first full-time multimedia reporter. He won the statewide Media and the Law award in 2000 and has also been recognized for his business, investigative and multimedia reporting. Paul earned a BA from Wake Forest University and has a Master's of Liberal Arts degree from Johns Hopkins University and a Master's of Journalism and Mass Communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He lives in Lewisville.

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