WESTFIELD – After the wells were finished back in August of 2019, the Westfield Department of Public Works finally activated the Owen Water Treatment Plant for use on June 22.

Westfield Department of Public Works Director Dave Billups said the delay only happened because the building still needed to be finished, even though the wells were fully operational.

He said, “The issues weren’t with the process, it was actually with the construction of the building. We had some problems with the contract with the building, and they were ready to go and we’ve been testing them since last summer.”

With the wells opening, he said that residents have no need to worry about the water quality. “After all the testing, the wells meet and exceed all water quality standards that we are required to meet by the Department of Environmental Protection, and the DEP has approved us putting them online,” he said.

He added that now that the treatment plant is finished, it should be up and running for the long haul. “We’ve rebuilt almost the entire water system in Westfield so it will be good for the next 25 or 30 years and some of it will be good forever.”

Billups said that because the wells are up and running, the Water Division can hopefully lift the city’s current water restrictions soon. He said, “The water restrictions are in place because those wells weren’t running, we have four wells on the north side of the city and we could only run one, but now we can run three. We would anticipate once this gets up and running that we can hopefully lift the water restrictions.”

He said that now is the perfect time to get the wells running because the demand for water is at the highest as a result of the restrictions in place.

Billups added that the completion of this project is the penultimate step in completely renovating the city’s entire water system. “It’s great that we’re getting to the point where we’re gonna have a very robust, reliable water system,” he said.

The last step in the overarching project is to create a water treatment plant for wells 1 and 2. Billups said, “We need to build a permanent treatment plant for wells 1 and 2 like we did for 7 and 8. That’s 100 percent designed, so once we finish this we’ll focus on that. I would guess with the lessons we’ve learned; we should be able to complete that within a year and a half of that opening.”