It took all of a week for Lyndon Kern to encounter his first hiccup as Iola’s water plant superintendent.
Kern, who replaced the retiring Toby Ross March 23 to assume administrative duties at the water plant, arrived at work Wednesday to find one of the plant’s chemical feed lines had shut down overnight with no advance warning.
“It was a new thing for us,” Kern said. “We know what happened, but we don’t know what caused it.”
He suspects the city having recently replaced one of the feed pumps played a role.
He was able to get the line reopened in short order, and with no adverse effects, but with a reminder that upgrading equipment sometimes requires closer than normal monitoring.
Such is life at the water plant, which was built in 2005, about two years before Kern was hired.
“I started in 2007, and so they had about two years of working the bugs out when I arrived,” he recalled. “Some, they were still working out when I started.”
What followed was roughly a decade of essentially smooth sailing, “where everything ran pretty well,” he said, “aside from some power outage issues, which we don’t have anymore.”
Now, it’s a matter of ensuring the plant continues unabated while replacing 20-year-old equipment.
Both the equipment and most of its pumps and mixers remain in good shape, Kern noted.
But the key to ensuring the plant’s longevity is with its automated control systems.
“Some of those computers are 20 years old, and their parts are obsolete,” he noted.
That gives Kern a lofty to-do list right out of the gate.
The plant is in the process of replacing its programmable logic controllers (PLCs), a computer system “that talks to everything in the plant,” he explained. “The stuff we have now is no longer supported by the company that makes them.”
Fortunately, the city was allowed some flexibility in replacing the PLCs because the water plant’s construction bonds were paid off in 2025.
That allowed the city to budget roughly $500,000 to upgrade its PLCs, which should be done by the end of the year, Kern said.
