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Looking like an aerial photo of craters along the Kenai Spur Highway and Beaver Loop, several maps were displayed by engineers Wednesday to show efforts taken in Kenai's continuing quest for a suitable drink of water.

Long criticized for its brown hue, Kenai city water for the most part was considered to be safe for human consumption. It's just aesthetically unpleasant.

Since the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency changed its rules in January 2006, however, water from two of Kenai's three wells no longer complies with limits on arsenic, now set at 10 parts per billion. Water from Well 2 tests at 6 ppb, but water from Well 1 has 34 ppb and Well 3 has 26 ppb, according to a report presented during a city council work session by Lorie Dilley of Hattenburg, Dilley and Linnell engineering consultants.

The engineers were brought in by the city to help find a solution.

City Manager Rick Koch said earlier, "We have three issues. There's color, the level of arsenic and the distribution system."

He said the city must come into compliance with the arsenic limitation, which he described as a health issue.

In terms of distribution, while the city's wells can produce enough water, it cannot be delivered sufficiently during peak demand, summer months, Koch said.

That, he said, becomes a safety issue should a fire occur and the fire department needs a sudden surge in water supply to extinguish the blaze.

Dilley told council members the engineering firm has analyzed 52 water samples from existing private wells, obtained 22 analyses from previously written literature, drilled six new exploratory wells to depths from 90 to 460 feet and investigated options for treating city water for arsenic and color.

High levels of iron were also found during the consultants' sampling and in some cases, problematic levels of chloride or manganese were found, Dilley said.

While arsenic levels are found to be higher in deeper wells, Dilley said if the city produces water from wells less than 50 feet deep, it must show that it is not influenced by surface water, which could carry additional contaminants.

The most promising test locations were in the area of Eagle Rock. On the other extreme, a well drilled near the Kenai Golf Course produced "pretty much orange water," Dilley said, due to high iron content. Iron was at 40 parts per million.

The engineering firm contacted several vendors to determine the treatment options for removing arsenic or color from Kenai's water, and received estimates for equipment and operating costs for treatment.

"Groundwater chemistry ... the presence of iron, aluminum and chloride ... will affect the treatment process," Dilley said.

To address the arsenic issue, if the city does not find another source of water with arsenic levels that comply, the city would need to build a water treatment plant.

Koch said the assumption is that the rate payer would pay 50 percent of the capital expense of building a water treatment plant and 100 percent of its operating costs.

With operating costs estimated to be between $250,000 and $500,000, Kenai's 1,856 rate payers would pay between $134 and $270 each per year, plus the interest on the capital cost. The total would be about $443 per year, or $37 per month, according to figures in the engineer's report.

Koch told the council members, "The first thing people say is, 'Before I got on the city system, I had great water.'"

"That's not true," he said. "They had no idea what was in it.

"The only thing they can tell us about is color ... and maybe they tested for coliform back when they drilled the well," he said.

Besides the issue of city water quality, Koch said, "the other part is we have people (on individual wells) with a water problem."

At one location along Bridge Access Road, well water was tested at 180 ppb arsenic.

Of the $8,480,000 estimated cost to build a treatment plant, drill more wells and install piping and pumps to distribute the water, Koch said the city already has "almost $5.5 million" in grant money in hand.

He said the city has a variance on arsenic compliance until 2009.

Phil Hermanek can be reached at phillip.hermanek@peninsulaclarion.com.