Floods cause days without water and boil water notices in Globe 

As the City of Globe continues to recover from flooding this month and last month, it has been juggling numerous infrastructure problems. 

One of the more significant problems has been water supply. 

Many City of Globe water customers were without water for multiple days after the October floods damaged city water lines. 

The city's public works department handled three different water line breaks in the area the following week, which impacted water supply throughout the city.

“I don't have an exact number on which area and which customers are affected or how many,” Globe Public Works Director John Angulo said October 14, a day after the most recent flood occurred. “Some people are almost out of water completely. Others have minimal pressure, but it is still feeding off the water that is gravity-fed off the Hagen tanks.”

On October 12, a 12-inch line near Cutter well fields was damaged, which is one of two parallel transmission lines coming from the Cutter Wells that feed the City of Globe water tank. Public works isolated the damaged line and continued feeding water through the secondary water line. This meant the city’s water pressure would be lower, but the water tanks would continue to fill off the secondary line.

The next morning, October 13 an eight-inch water line feeding into San Carlos Drive, also known as the Apache Peaks area, also broke, leaving those 24 residents without water for the next four days, until the line was repaired by the afternoon of October 16. Meanwhile, the city began delivering potable water to the area. 

That evening, around 10:30 p.m., the second 12-inch line from the Cutter well fields was damaged. To make matters worse, the water tank monitoring system was still broken from the first storm that hit the area, Angulo said, meaning that it did not pick up the drainage on the tank that night. 

“We woke up to a busted 12-inch line, and the water tank had actually started basically draining itself without the system working,” Angulo said. “The water line that broke was the only one that was feeding Downtown Globe, or this whole area, really, so we've been running off of our water tanks right now.”

By the early evening on October 14, the public works team had repaired the secondary 12-inch line.

“That will start filling the tanks. It will start taking care of any low water pressure issues," Angulo said. “The rest of the system will be functional.”

The next day, October 15, the City of Globe Water Department, in conjunction with Gila County Public Health and Community Services, released a precautionary boil water notice for all City of Globe water customers, advising that as a precautionary safety health measure, residents should boil tap water before using it for drinking, cooking, brushing teeth, or washing dishes. 

The advisory was issued in response to the water line break and repair, which could have allowed harmful bacteria or other microorganisms to enter the water system.

Public Works crews flushed the lines and submitted the city’s water to a lab for testing. 

By the afternoon of October 17, the city received the laboratory results from a certified lab in Phoenix confirming that all water samples met state and federal safety standards, with no signs of contamination.

As of October 21, the first 12-inch line break at the Cutter Wells had yet to be repaired. The city originally anticipated the repair would begin October 20, but the contractors were tied up helping the public works department repair a sanitary sewer overflow on Haskins and Broad, caused by rocks and sand that got into the system during the last flood, Angulo said.