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Sunshine and clouds mixed. High 86F. Winds WSW at 10 to 20 mph..

Some clouds. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low near 70F. Winds SW at 10 to 15 mph.

BRIAN QUINN/DAILY NEWS The city Water Filtration Plant has recovered after an incident Sunday, county Highway Superintendent Tim Hens said Monday.

BRIAN QUINN/DAILY NEWS The city Water Filtration Plant has recovered after an incident Sunday, county Highway Superintendent Tim Hens said Monday.

BATAVIA — The failure of a part at the city Water Filtration Plant shut down the pumps for about two hours Sunday, before the city found a way to get power to the pumps again, county Highway Superintendent Tim Hens told the Public Services Committee Monday.

Hens said there was an incident at the 100-plus-year-old plant on Lehigh Avenue.

“They had a controller issue ... When the clear wells fall, it sends a power signal to the pumps to turn off. There’s a little second unit PLC control panel that controls that. The second unit and the control panel basically died and defaulted to the ‘off’ position. There was no power going to the pumps,” Hens said. “For about a two-hour period yesterday afternoon, there was absolutely zero water coming out of the Batavia water plant. We were living off of water tanks, storage tanks. Water levels drop in the tanks pretty quickly.”

Hens said he, County Manager Matt Landers and City Manager Rachael Tabelski were in communication with one another. The Monroe County Water Authority was called and the Water Authority increased its maximum pumping at a pumping station at North Road in Le Roy to 3.5 million gallons, which is the highest amount of water pumped through that station.

The city on Sunday figured out the sending unit and short-circuited it to get power to the pumps again.

“It’s been running on manual ever since,” he said. “Overnight ... the city was able to recover their tanks fairly quickly to normal levels.”

Hens said this is the kind of thing officials have been worried about for years now.

“In this case, we were lucky that it was only a two-hour glitch and we got through it, but really, other than getting as much water as we can from Monroe County, there is no other band-aid,” he said. “We can’t just put another pump somewhere and pump water. If it had gone on for any extended period of time yesterday or into the night ... we would have been able to replace probably half of the capacity of the plant. We would have been short about two million gallons.”

Hens explained afterward that the second unit was like a light switch that turns the power to the pumps off and on. The city was able to bypass the switch and made sure the pumps had power so the pumps could run.

“Then they could control them manually as they needed to,” he said.