By Susan Redden

sredden@joplinglobe.com

LAMAR, Mo. — A collapsed intake pipe led to a boil order in the city of Lamar last week, Lynn Calton, city manager said Monday.

City officials said they hope the boil order affecting the town’s 4,600 residents will be lifted no later than today.

Calton said the problem was discovered early Saturday and has since been corrected. He said the water system was being flushed Monday and new water samples would be drawn for testing in a Joplin laboratory.

“We’ll drive them there and tell them to hurry,” Calton said. “It depends on how quickly they can do the analysis, but we’re hoping the boil order can be lifted soon.”

Calton said officials with the Missouri Department of Natural Resources, which imposed the order, were to be in Lamar on Monday.

He said city workers “struggled all last week” searching for the problem before the culprit was found.

“The problem always was turbidity (cloudy water) and we had taken different parts of the plant down for scrubbing, to try to clear it up,” he said. “After trying everything else, we found it was the intake pipe.”

Raw water for the city is collected through a water intake pipe in the middle of the city reservoir. The long pipe reaches out into the lake and there is a winch on the end of the pipe so plant operators can adjust the height on the pipe in the lake to get the best dissolved oxygen content in water going into the treatment plant.

But, Calton said, the cable that holds the pipe at the desired level broke and the intake pipe dropped onto the floor of the lake.

“It had fallen into about 50 years of sediment; we never would have won that battle,” he said.

A Lamar fireman who is a certified diver confirmed the problem and reattached the cable Saturday.

“We’ve been pumping good water since Saturday afternoon,” he said.

DNR officials will check the water for clarity and bacteria levels before the boil order is lifted. Calton said the testing would be done in Joplin by a certified lab because DNR tests done in Jefferson City normally take three days.