General (16)
Susana Barrios
From:Stephanie Mercadante <burglin.stephanie@gmail.com>
Sent:Tuesday, August 25, 2026 6:21 PM
To:Public Comment
Subject:\[EXTERNAL\] On Behalf of Marc Herbert
Warning: This email originated from outside the City of Anaheim. Do not click links or open
attachments unless you recognize the sender and are expecting the message.
For public comment on August 25, 2026:
The City has still not provided an answer as to why the water pressure collapsed last month. So let's
take a stroll down memory lane. In August 2025, Well 59 experienced a serious low-chlorine
event.
Chlorine provides a disinfectant residual that helps protect drinking water from bacteria and
other microorganisms.
According to City employees, Mickey Garcia, a Public Utilities employee and Councilmember
Natalie Rubalcava's husband, inadvertently left an isolation valve closed after maintenance. Risk
Management identified that closed valve as a root cause that caused the low chlorine issue. But
we know Mickey Garcia will NEVER be reprimanded.
But something made that situation much worse.
The safety protections that would normally alert operators didn't work.
The low-chlorine alarms failed. The expected visual warnings didn't happen. And the automatic
shutdown failed to take the well offline.
How does that happen?
Employees say Anaheim's traditional acceptance process required SCADA verification, alarm
testing, shutdown testing and operational-interlock testing before new facilities were placed into
service.
In simple terms: you test-drive the car before you buy it.
So the Council needs to determine: Who accepted these wells? Who verified the
programming? And why weren't these protections working?
According to the operators, the engineering dept. raised shutdown-setpoint concerns with Keith
McDonald long before the incident, yet those concerns remained unresolved.
And when experienced operators continued raising concerns, what happened?
They became the targets of discipline. Rather than fixing the system, Keith tried to fire the
whistleblowers, but he was unsuccessful. Then, on May 15th, the whistleblowers informed
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Dukku Lee of the system issues. Then came July 28th. Water pressure collapsed. Disneyland,
Angel Stadium, City Hall, residents and businesses were affected.
Everyone seemed surprised.
But the whistleblowers weren't.
They had been warning leadership about these problems for more than a year.
And yet, according to these employees, nobody independently investigated the larger
allegations.
So when we talk about July 28th, brown water and excessive flushing, stop treating these things as
isolated incidents that were not preventable.
They absolutely were. Leadership just wasn't listening.
Investigate the allegations. Interview the whistleblowers. Determine who accepted these
systems and why known problems weren't corrected.
Because this shouldn’t be about protecting management or this Council’s image. It should be about
protecting RESIDENTS.
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