Fredonia Trustee Paul Wandel continues to monitor the water situation in the village.

After four days, the boil-water order in Fredonia has been lifted.

According to Chautauqua County officials, turbidity levels have fallen to safe levels and operations have returned to normal. Two consecutive days of testing indicate that the water in the distribution system is safe for drinking, cooking, making ice, brushing teeth and making coffee.

It was the 10th boil order for village users in the past 37 months. On Monday night, the situation was discussed at the Village Board meeting.

“Basically what happened (was), with the intense rain we had last week, the turbidity levels on the raw water coming into the plant were excessively high,” the trustee said. “But I was informed by Mr. Fred, turbidity levels are normal now. He is also stocking up on two primary chemicals on that end of the plant that are necessary for separating the solids from the liquids.”

Wandel continued that Fred “is going to closely monitor the turbidity levels (in) all three sections of the plant. There’s three sections of the plant — the raw input section, there’s a midpoint, and the clear well before it exits the plant. Right now, all those readings are nominal, so that’s good news.”

Fred will also backwash filters once every 60 hours instead of once every 90 hours, in another step to fight high water turbidity, Wandel said.

Numerous Fredonians were frustrated Friday that they did not get alerts about the boil order from the NY Alerts system. Trustee Christine Cruz Keefe was one of them. A teacher at Fredonia Central School, Cruz Keefe complained she did not get an alert when the boil order went down Friday while she was teaching. She said she received very little information about the boil order overall.

“I did notice that we did not get those alerts,” Mayor Michael Ferguson said. The state Department of Health assured him it tried to put alerts out, but “there was maybe a switch failure on it — that’s no excuse, but it’s something we don’t control.”

Ferguson acknowledged the NY Alerts system is a work in progress in Fredonia. He noted that a previous iteration of the notification service failed because it showed up as an out-of-state phone number, and people refused to answer it.