Columbus City officials say that they acted quickly to get the word out during last week’s E. coli situation with the city water system, moving within minutes of test results that confirmed E. coli in a city well.

Mary Ferdon, the city’s director of administration, said that they believe the public was never in any danger. She laid out the timeline in detail explaining that the city’s first test result indicating e-coli in the well and in the city distribution system came back Thursday from tests performed Wednesday.

The Indiana Department of Environmental Management required second samples be done on Thursday to ensure that it was not a false positive. Those results came back Friday afternoon showing the contamination in the well, but not in the city distribution system. After receiving the confirmation, the city had 24 hours to alert the public to boil its water, but instead sent out that warning to media outlets within minutes. That went out about 4:15 p.m. Friday afternoon. The city also alerted the hospital and public health department of the results at that time.

During Tuesday night’s city council meeting, Keith Reeves, director of Columbus City Utilities, gave a report on what happened. He echoed Ferdon’s statement that utility customers were never in danger of getting sick from contaminated water. Reeves noted a report from Columbus Regional Health and state health department officials that showed their were no reported cases of patients with E. coli.

Reeves went on to tell council members that the reason no action was initially taken to inform the public about the positive test result was the frequencies of “false-positives” in water tests such as these. He says that the utility usually gets two or three false positives each year and the Indiana Department of Environmental Management discourages the possibility for alarming communities until accurate information is known.

With that, Reeves stressed that the well in question was taken out of service immediately after the discovery of the first positive test. At no time, he says, did the city’s water distribution system test positive for E. coli. Reeves noted that the utility doesn’t yet know what led to the contamination, but an investigation is ongoing. Until that is resolved, he says the well in question will remain off-line.

Ferdon said that one thing they would do differently going ahead, would be to ask the county emergency operations center sooner to send out alerts over its Everbridge system. She said that city officials did not consider alerting the public in that way until too late in the process, and those alerts, which are sent by phone, text and e-mail, did not go out until about 8 p.m. Friday.