Telluriders who woke up early Thursday morning and made coffee or filled up their water bottle got a little something extra in their beverages:
Dirt.

The water treatment facility reported an elevated level of cloudiness — or turbidity — in the water from midnight to 8 a.m., caused by a combination of man and nature: raging spring runoff brought dirt down from the mountains and “operator error”  allowed a filter to get too dirty and let that dirt through.

God made dirt (as the saying goes) and so there were no real health concerns, even for those who drank the cloudy water.

“Dirt, per se, will not hurt you,” said William Nichols, who helps run Telluride’s water treatment facilities. They received no reports from people who felt they were harmed by the cloudy water.

The Telluride treatment plant, which sits a couple of miles up Mill Creek, treated all the dirty water with chlorine. The chlorine mixes with the water for a half hour before the water is released into storage tanks or into pipes that flow downhill toward town. The chlorine killed anything living that could be harmful to humans, such as bacteria or diseases. (God also, as the saying goes, made the bacteria that causes diptheria.)

“The chlorine level kills anything alive,” said Nichols.

A notice from the Town of Telluride was posted on townspeoples’ doors Friday. It said there was no need to boil the water or do anything else, and the water was back to its regular level of cleanliness. And anyway, the note said, “turbidity has no known health effects.”

Pulled from Mill Creek and the glacier at the top of it, the town’s water is made up of melting snow and spring water that has little chance to be contaminated, aside from deer and elk taking their morning constitutionals.

But due to the extremely deep snowfall this year (avid skiers would describe the snow depth — in scientific terms — as “sick, bra”) the runoff has been stronger than usual, and kicked up dirt and sediment from the land.

The dirty water runs through a filter at the Mill Creek treatment plant. An alarm is supposed to sound when the filter gets too dirty and needs to be cleaned.

But miscommunication between two technicians caused the alarm to be switched off that night. (Each thought the other had turned it on.) The filter got dirty, but no alarm warned the plant operators, and so dirty water got through, Nichols said.

But the water trouble does bring into sharper focus the town’s desire for a water system upgrade.

The town is trying to build a new water treatment plant near the old town of Pandora that would bring the town the cleanest water imaginable, from Blue Lake. But the town is stuck in a legal dispute with the Idarado company, which donated the land, and construction of that plant has been delayed until at least 2010 or 2012.

Until that happens, the town manager believes that the water treatment plant needs to be upgraded. As part of a bigger plan to improve the town’s infrastructure, town manager Frank Bell will ask the town council tomorrow to consider paying $400,000 for a new filtration system that would help avoid turbidity. Bell likened the upgrade to “adding memory capacity to a … computer.” Telluride mayor Stu Fraser said he supports the upgrades.

On Thursday, turbidity rose as high as five times the EPA-acceptable level. Stan Kiersztyn, the head of the treatment plants, noted that acceptable levels of turbidity have been lowered by the Environmental Protection Agency in recent years.

“What used to be ‘safe’ water is now illegal water,” he said.

Before the notice was posted, no one called to say their water was cloudy, Kiersztyn said. After the note went up, he received a few phone calls from people worried about their health.

Kiersztyn said only infants and the very elderly could have been at any risk at all. Anyone who’s worried should call their doctor or the EPA water hotline at 800-426-4791.

Telluriders drink some of the cleanest water around.

“The water that we have here is extremely clean,” said Fraser. “We should be very glad we’ve got the type of water we have — which should cut down on the need for bottled water.”

With the high snowpack and roiling runoff, the filter will have to be monitored more closely than ever this off-season.

“Spring run-off this year could prove to be very problematic,” the notice read.