Water district has plans in place for nightmare scenario



“This is an out-of-the-box situation that I’ve never dealt with before,” admitted Valley Canter Municipal Water District Gen. Mgr. Gary Arant at Monday’s board meeting, which, due to the evolving coronavirus crisis (is there any other kind now?) was held with one director teleconferencing and all of the staff and directors “social distancing” by maintaining at least six feet away from each other in the board room.

At the meeting Gaby Olson, VCMWD’s Safety and Regulatory Supervisor, gave an overview of the district’s Pandemic Response Plan, which is how the district will respond to what has become the nightmare scenario of the decade, if not the most serious crisis since 9-11.

The plan recognizes a stark fact of life: even in the midst of a crisis where people may be sheltering in place and most commerce has ground to a halt, no matter how many employees are out sick, you can’t stop delivering water to the public. You must do whatever must be done to keep the water flowing from the tap.

Because Governor Gavin Newsom’s executive order late last week has temporarily suspended some provisions of the Brown Act, the board was able to hold a teleconferenced meeting with one of the directors attending by phone. All votes were taken by roll call. 

The procedure for the COVID-19 situation is an update of a protocol that was first put into writing in 2009 as a response to the H1N1 virus threat. It has been updated periodically, with the purpose being to help the district carry out its mission of providing healthy water to the community. 

The plan calls on employees of the district to be aware of the main symptoms of the virus: fever, cough, respiratory illness. It encourages sick employees to stay home, and to measure their own temperature daily, and, if they are sick, to expect to be off work from 2-6 weeks.

If employees are sick at work, they will be asked to go home.

Employees are encouraged to use hand sanitizers and to frequently wash their hands, especially after handling cash. They are urged to frequently wipe down surfaces such as doorknobs and shelves with bleach cleaning wipes and encourage customers to use the hand sanitizer dispensed just outside the entrance to the office before they enter the building.

Social distancing is the slogan of the day, with handshakes off limits. “We are minimizing group meetings and have cancelled most meetings,” said Olson. 

They are also limiting visits by outsiders to people in the office; limiting customer contact; limiting vendor contact and encouraging customers to make payments using the district’s website, or by dropping payments off outside. 

In a more grim assessment, the staff has been looking at how many people could be incapacitated and still carry out the district’s mission. The answer, said Arant is, “Our staff will continue to provide service. Unlike other businesses, I can’t close our doors for two weeks.”

To ensure that, they have looked at critical job functions that might be shouldered by other individuals should some employees be out of commission for a while. And what functions might be allowed to fall by the wayside for a time.

Functions that cannot be allowed to lapse include service calls, maintaining the wastewater system, water quality monitoring, dam inspections and basic operations.

Board President Bob Polito asked if they are requiring employees to take their own temperatures each day before coming into work. And stay home if they have a fever.

Olson replied that yes, employees are asked to monitor their temperatures. “We are discouraging anyone from coming into work sick,” said Olson.

When handling cash, which is notoriously a petri dish of vile bacteria, district employees are instructed to do the transactions and then use sanitizer. At some point, said Arant, “we might lock it down and not let anyone in the office.”

At the end of the report Arant told the board that he might need flexibility in how the district implements the plan in this rapidly evolving environment. “This is not a normal situation. If this gets as bad as it might we cannot not function as an agency as we normally would. People are relying on us. This is an evolving out of the box situation. ”

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