BAXTER — In January of 2021, the Baxter Water Treatment Plant closed for what was supposed to be a week of repairs. Flash forward a year, and the plant is still offline. What started as a repair turned into the discovery of a catastrophic filtration failure. Baxter activated its water interconnect building and began purchasing water from Brainerd Public Utilities to offset filtration failures in its water treatment plant. The plant was closed down in early 2021 to address media failure in three of the four filter caps — the permeable barrier that constrains the media and allows the water to pass through. The catastrophic failure, combined with the summer…