MISQUAH — The water department completed its annual hydrant flushing across town last week, restoring clear water to the east side by Thursday and generating, by the department’s own tally, three telephone calls to City Clerk Donna Skoglund — exactly the number the department had predicted, and, it noted with quiet satisfaction, “down one from last year.”

Flushing, which the crew runs each June to clear accumulated sediment from the water mains, briefly turned tap water on the east side a rusty brown. The water department had advised residents in advance, by a notice in this paper and a card in the mail, to run a cold tap until it cleared and to hold off on the white laundry — advice that, Skoglund reported, “was followed by everyone who reads the paper and surprised everyone who does not, which is roughly the split on most things.”

The mechanics are unglamorous and necessary: the town’s sixty-one hydrants are opened in sequence over four days, each run wide until the water goes from rust to clear — a few thousand gallons per hydrant, scouring loose the winter’s sediment before it can settle into anybody’s water heater. The crew is two: Arne Fossum of the water department and whichever summer kid he has this year, working east to west because the dead-end mains off Third Avenue, laid in 1948 and never looped since, hold the most rust and are best saved, Fossum says, “for when we’re warmed up and past caring.”

The water remained safe to drink throughout, the discoloration being cosmetic, a point the card made in bold and the callers made anyway. Skoglund, who has kept the city’s books and fielded its phone since 1994, has come to regard the June calls as a fixed feature of the season, like the mayflies. “You can mail the card, and you should,” she said. “But some folks just want to hear a person say it’s fine. That’s a service too. It’s most of the service, honestly.”

Of the three calls, she reported, one concerned the brown water, one concerned a neighbor’s sprinkler running at an hour the caller found suspicious, and the third “turned into a nice long visit about the Sorensen boy and how he’s doing down at school, and I didn’t mind one bit, and we never did get back to the water.” The water was declared clear and safe townwide by Friday, and the matter closed for another year, the card filed away to be mailed, unread, again next June.