Bloomington Official stresses the city’s plan and urgency for improving water quality
Written by aahunn@ilstu.edu on March 10, 2025
BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – Residents in the Bloomington-Normal area have been noticing an unpleasant taste and smell to their water. However, with recent improvements to the water treatment process, residents should begin to notice a significant improvement. Deputy City Manager Sue McLaughlin shared about a new system that should make a difference for residents.
“Just Wednesday afternoon we started feeding powdered activated carbon (PAC), which is a compound that will address the taste and odor,” McLaughlin said. “We are hopeful that by this weekend we should see a noticeable difference.”
In addition to the temporary PAC system, a permanent PAC system will be installed next spring. Currently, the compound is being hand-fed to address the issue as quickly as possible.
The differences in taste and smell of the water began after they switched the primary water source from Lake Bloomington to Evergreen Lake. While the city routinely makes this switch, the filter system didn’t handle it as expected this time.
“We have had occasional issues when we have switched lakes and this time we switched the lake at the end of January and for some reason it was much stronger and immediate than we expected,” McLaughlin explained. “Typically, our filter system has handled the taste and odor, this time it did not. It was higher than expected so that’s why we took the next step which is this PAC system to get it taken care of.”
Along with the PAC system, the city has also enhanced the granular activated carbon (GAC) system that was previously in use.
“We’ve done a couple things there- one, we’ve added filters so now we are up to 14 filters [instead of six] and we slowed the flow over those filters so that the GAC can work better, rather than the water rushing over those filters and not having time to work,” McLaughlin said.
McLaughlin emphasized that this isn’t something the city has taken lightly.
“We are trying to send out the message that this is not acceptable to the city and we know how important it is,” McLughlin said. “We are not only addressing this immediate issue, but we are taking steps to make sure this doesn’t happen again. We want people to know that we are learning from this situation and we are going to work to make sure that this doesn’t happen again.”
