PLYMOUTH — Brown, dirty water coming from the pipes of a high school in Luzerne County is causing concern among students and parents.
It happened Monday, and since then, the Wyoming Valley West School District has been hauling in dozens of gallons of fresh water every day so students have something safe to drink.
While students were hoping school would be canceled for a few days, school district leaders were quick to act. They brought in extra bottled water for students, allowed students to bring their own bottles of water, and hauled in a hundred gallons of fresh water every day for the cafeteria to cook.
The high school is getting discolored water partly because of a broken fire hydrant that had to be fixed and partly because the water company is flushing its pipes.
“Whenever there’s a large volume of water that’s flushed, there’s sediment that naturally occurs in those pipes,” said Susan Turcmanovich of Pennsylvania American Water.
But with school out next month why not wait until then to flush the pipes? Pennsylvania American Water officials say the company is flushing pipes from Forest City all the way to Mocanaqua and it takes a long time to do that.
“It takes us a good three and a half months to flush in this area, so to try to avoid those areas that may be impacted is a little difficult, but we do notify them ahead of time.”
Officials from Wyoming Valley West expect the water to be back to normal Thursday but have extra water on hand in case they’ll need it.
