First things first: Just because the City of Salem declared a drinking water emergency doesn’t mean there’s an immediate crisis. The water in Salem is clean and safe to drink.
“The emergency declaration,” explained Jason Pulley, the utility planning manager for City of Salem Public Works, “it’s more of a term of art.”
The Salem City Council unanimously approved an emergency declaration last Monday to help it prepare for next year, when city officials fear a drawdown of the Detroit Reservoir upstream could cause a drinking water shortage.
It’s not because there would be too little water. The water coming from the North Santiam River could have so much silt that they wouldn’t be able to effectively collect and clean it.
Pulley said the city has been working on key improvements to its drinking water plant since January.
But the usual timelines for the government contracts would be too slow, and he said they wouldn’t finish before the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers begins its planned deep drawdown of Detroit Lake Reservoir in the fall of 2026.
The emergency declaration allows the city to relax its purchasing rules and move faster.
“We are doing this to avoid a state of emergency,” he said.
The reservoir supplies water to the North Santiam River, which is the city’s primary source of drinking water.
About 200,000 residents across Salem, Turner and parts of unincorporated Marion County would be affected by the potential shortage next year. It could also leave the city with too little water for firefighting.
The drawdown will bring the reservoir’s water to its lowest level since the Detroit Dam was built in the early 1950s. The measure is being done to improve downstream passages for endangered fish.
The idea is that by lowering the water in the reservoir enough, it creates more of a natural flow that can flush baby salmon through the dams and onward in their journey to the ocean.
The National Marine Fisheries Service issued a biological opinion back in 2024 calling for a drawdown of Detroit Lake. The Corps of Engineers delayed the drawdown until 2026 to assess community concerns.
Similar conversations to Salem’s are happening throughout the Willamette Valley.
The Corps of Engineers operates 13 dams throughout the river valley, and three of those dams — Lookout Point, Cougar and Green Peter — have previously undergone deep drawdown operations to benefit salmon.
Other towns, including Sweet Home and Lebanon, have grappled with the same problem after decades of sediment that built up behind the dams suddenly rushed into their drinking water plants.
In January, Congress ordered the Corps of Engineers to study the water quality problems caused by drawdowns and to identify ways to ease the financial burden on local treatment plants. There may be more of a push after last week’s declaration to get these answers and more money from the feds.
There are two major infrastructure challenges facing Salem.
The first is developing alternative drinking water sources. The second is making improvements at the primary treatment facility, which includes resanding filters to keep up with the increased sediment released by the drawdown.
The estimated cost to prepare and upgrade the city’s water system for this is roughly $8 million. This would include building new groundwater wells and adding another pump at the city’s emergency water supply station in Keizer.
OPB visited the water treatment facility at Geren Island in Stayton this past week and spoke with Pulley to learn more about how we got here, what is and isn’t working, and what residents need to know going forward.
Pulley’s answers have been edited for length and clarity.
Q: First, can you break down the crux of the issue with the drawdown?
Pulley: The problem that we face is that we use slow sand filtration at our Geren Island water treatment plant.
Though it’s highly effective and very much a proven technology, this process relies on relatively clean water to operate efficiently, which is an issue with the expected high turbidity levels in Salem. Turbidity is the measure of sediment in the water.
Q: Let’s nerd out about the science for a sec. Tell us more about the muddiness of the water that we’re worried about.
Pulley: But what we’ve seen from the South Santiam River and the Green Peter operations is spikes as high as 1,000 NTU. At that level of turbidity, we expect not to be able to bring in raw surface water from the river and use it on our sand filters.
So, the plan is to use a combination of other sources.
We have groundwater resources at our Geren Island treatment plant that can supplement surface water. We have an aquifer storage and recovery system in South Salem that can supplement the water that we need from Geren Island. And we also have an intertie with the city of Keizer, which we can use to supplement that lack of water.
Q: There isn’t a concern about this affecting firefighting resources this year, correct?
Pulley: Correct. We have 19 reservoirs in our system that all store water.
A reservoir stores water for two purposes. One is to meet peak hourly demands during high-flow periods. We’re constantly filling and letting our reservoirs rise and fall with daily demands.
But about half of the storage that we have in our system is dedicated to fire flow, so that if we do have a large fire, we have enough reserves, and we’re not having to rely on water coming in from our treatment plant, to fight fires.
We have roughly 136 million gallons of storage in our system, available in our reservoirs at any given time.
That number will fluctuate depending on where we are in our fill cycle or depletion cycle. But 50% of that needs to be dedicated to firefighting capabilities.
Getting to critical storage levels in our reservoirs could put a strain on our system if we had a large fire break out in town.
Q: For residents who use this water, are there habits they should change concerning daily water use? Can they take shorter showers or water their lawn less? Do individual actions like that end up amounting to any significant impact on the reservoirs?
Pulley: In the summer months, water curtailment is extremely effective because we can get the message out to turn off your sprinkler systems, don’t wash your car, don’t fill up your pool, things like that.
When we talk about this drawdown, we’re looking at it happening over November and December, when we’re basically down to what we would consider our “base water demand.” So, this is just essential residential water use.
We will educate the public about this when it happens next year, but we don’t expect conservation to be a primary strategy.
Q: The upgrades are going to cost a lot of money. There are conversations about trying to secure more federal funding. But the Army Corps has made it clear that they are not a budgetary branch. We don’t know yet how this will affect individual residents in terms of increased utility rates. So, what should Oregonians understand about the money behind all of this?
Pulley: This is a federal mandate, and so we are working with our congressional delegation to try to secure some additional funding to offset these costs. We know, as you rightly point out, that the Corps of Engineers is not an appropriation agency. They do not hand out money.
So, what we’re looking at right now is a one-time cost — the $8 million that was talked about Monday night — is money that we have. It doesn’t directly affect our ratepayers right now. It’s the ongoing cost that may come from the continuation of this operation over the long term that may impact them.
With all of the budgetary concerns that have been going on in Salem over the last year — with the levy that was just passed and the potential lack of funding for the library, Parks and Recreation and Center 50+ — it’s important to point out that we operate under a completely different structure.
Q: In the first few years of the drawdown, there are going to be larger amounts of sediment that have built up. How much of the upgrades and the funding are already factored into this project? Is there a possibility that you spend a lot of money to fix the shorter-term problem and won’t need to do that down the line?
Pulley: We were proactive. We’ve already drilled one additional well at Geren Island two years ago, because we understand that, when you’re relying on a dynamic river, such as the North Santiam, things could come up — it could be sediment, it could be cyanotoxins, it could be something else that we haven’t even thought of.
We need to build that resiliency into our system.
So, having these additional groundwater sources at Geren Island is something that was definitely on our bingo card.
We just didn’t expect to play it as soon as we’re doing it.
This story comes to you from the Northwest News Network, a collaboration between public media organizations in Oregon and Washington.
