Left, this puddle of melted snow appeared Wednesday afternoon at the intersection of Hoover Avenue and County Road HH. Local utilities officials say it’s a false sense of hope for those suffering from frozen laterals. (City-Times photo)

City-Times Staff

Wednesday’s high temp of 21 degrees may have felt like shorts & t-shirt weather, but local water officials say the danger of freezing laterals and pipes is still quite real.

A run water order has been issued for all residents of the Village of Whiting until further notice, but Village of Plover and City of Stevens Point leaders say at present they have no plans to issue municipal-wide alerts.

Stevens Point Utilities Director Joel Lemke was unavailable for comment Wednesday but has said there is no city alert or run water order in the works. Several homes in the city have a history of frozen laterals, he said, and the city is working with those homes to keep the pipes working.

“We’d have to have a lot longer of a deep freeze before we’d do that in Plover,” said Plover Water Director David Fritsch. Fritsch said the village has already assisted a number of homes with frozen laterals and estimates the frost depth throughout much of the village to be anywhere from 3 1/2 to 5 1/12 feet deep.

“We’ve got a known list of homes with a history of problems, because this is an extremely bad winter, that we’ve been in contact with since January 10 and we’ve had them running water since,” Fritsch said.

Village of Whiting residents have been asked to continuously run a pencil-lead sized stream of tap water since February 5th.

“It’s like we’re in a little ice age now, holy cow,” said Whiting Utilities Director Matt Saloun. “We’ve been seeing a good six feet of frost out in the streets, and what would be a typical or normal amount would be maybe in the 3 1/2 or 4 foot range.”

Saloun said there’s no way to tell how long residents would be asked to run their water, but he said if recent weather is any indication it likely will continue until early April.

“Our concern is we’re going to start getting some of these nice days where it’s sunny and people get that false sense of security where they can turn their water off,” Saloun said. “But obviously there’s a little bit of lag time for that frost to come out. It takes a while to come out of the ground.”

According to the National Weather Service, the subzero deep freeze could be nearing an end, with temps reaching double digits for the next week, peaking with a high of 31 on Thursday and a 36 on Monday.