Grand Rapids Set to Chlorinate Water Supply After Legionnaires’ Outbreak

Over the last several months, the city of Grand Rapids has seen a Legionnaires’ disease outbreak, and the Public Utilities Center has now made the decision to chlorinate the water system to kill off the Legionella bacteria starting this week.

According to the Minnesota Department of Health, Grand Rapids has had 14 official cases of the respiratory sickness, 11 of which required hospitalization. But what exactly is Legionnaires’ disease?

“Legionnaires’ is a disease that’s pneumonia-like that’s caused by Legionella bacteria, which is very common in low concentrations in public water supplies,” Grand Rapids Public Utilities General Manager Julie Kennedy explained. “It’s only when those levels of bacteria get elevated or amplified, we say, that they pose health risks.”

Kennedy also spoke to how the people of Grand Rapids were getting exposed.

“Typically, it’s coming from showers,” she said. “The most typical causes of Legionnaires’ disease are cooling towers, maybe condensation from air conditioners … or fountains. In our case, we don’t have that. We haven’t seen that throughout our community. And so what they’re looking at – they being the Department of Health – is shower heads that are connected to the municipal water supply.”

The Grand Rapids Public Utility Center has made the decision to chlorinate the water supply to kill the bacteria.

“This is a permanent disinfection for us, this is a permanent change to our water operations,” Kennedy emphasized. “It is not something that we will just do a mass chlorination and then end. We are set to start chlorinating through our north tower, through our water treatment plant, on June 24th. We’ve got customer messaging that has gone out. As far as letters, we’ve got three messaging boards throughout town and a significant amount of customer communication on that.”

When asked about how the chlorination will affect people getting access to safe water, Kennedy replied, “We can only do so much from our side and then once it leaves our pipes into the building, it’s really out of our hands. We can chlorinate and have disinfected water in our mains, but in order for it to be effective and prevent the the Legionnaires’ disease, it’s got to get all the way through to the customer shower heads. And so our customers need to continue to pull that water through their system by flushing and keeping their hot water temperatures high enough.”

The Public Utilities Center and Minnesota Department of Health are urging residents to seek medical attention if they start experiencing any respiratory or pneumonia-like symptoms.