If your home is among the 650+ Seattle Public Utilities customers that will be affected by a planned overnight water outage next week – first reported here yesterday – watch your postal mail for the official notice. (We’re affected and received ours this morning.) Notification is one of the things we asked SPU’s Sabrina Register about when following up on the announcement of the outage, scheduled to start at 9 pm Thursday, October 5th, ending by 4 am Friday, October 6th, affecting 650+ customers in Morgan Junction, Gatewood, and Fauntleroy. The notice said crews would be replacing three valves, so we asked where and why, and whether it was related at all to the frequent brown-water reports earlier this year. First answer: The work will be done at California/Frontenac. As for the rest, it’s explained as mostly preventive maintenance:

The valves are additions to the existing system and do not replace old equipment. This won’t alter pressure or increase capacity, and the work is unrelated to discolored water occurrences. The purpose of the valve installation is to increase flexibility for how we send water through the distribution system. Additionally, the valves will reduce the number of customers impacted during future outages, whether during emergency repairs or planned shutdowns such as the one that will occur on October 5. Specifically, this work will allow for isolating the feeder main in California Ave north or south of the intersection. Generally, we are working to add valves throughout the system where we have long stretches of main with valves spaced far apart.

The official notice – most of which we featured in yesterday’s report – is here.