District Flushing Away Water After Residents Raise a Stink

Water district officials in Costa Mesa said Monday that they expected to have the foul-smelling water that prompted citizens’ complaints flushed from water lines by the end of the day.

That, they hoped, would put an end to the embarrassing chain of events that over the weekend had made tap water smell like rotten eggs and worse, mainly in the Mesa Verde section of the city.

Chuck Hamilton, a spokesman for the Mesa Consolidated Water District, said that some of the district’s wells are particularly deep, so the water they produce usually contains elements that affect color, taste and odor. None of the elements threaten health, he said. But to make the water more palatable, it is treated at the well before being pumped into water lines.

Last week, however, the wells produced water faster than equipment could treat it, thus allowing water into the lines that still contained hydrogen sulfide, a gas commonly described as smelling like “rotten eggs,” Hamilton said.

Compounding the problem was a mistake made by a construction crew, Hamilton said. The crew closed a water line valve that should have remained open, thus trapping some of the smelly water in the lines.

Hamilton said that water crews were systematically flushing the fouled water from the lines but that some of it may have flowed into home water heaters, where it will remain until the household resident uses it up in some way.