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SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE - Wayne Formaniuk says Yellowknifers should never have to worry about their tap water. That's his job.

He's one of four regular pumphouse operators who monitor the city's drinking water 24-hours a day as it flows from Yellowknife River to the main chlorination station through an eight km pipeline underneath Great Slave Lake.

Scot Gillard, assistant superintendent of the water and sewer division with the city's public works department, seen here in the main pumphouse, said the pipe running under Great Slave Lake from Yellowknife River to Pumphouse 1 will soon need to be replaced. - Katie May/NNSL photo How your water gets to you Pumphouse 2 on Yellowknife River feeds water to Pumphouse 1 on 48 Street, which monitors the water at each pumphouse station Chlorinated water is picked up at Pumphouse 2 and trucked to Dettah Pumphouse 1 carries the water to Pumphouse 3, Pumphouse 4 and Pumphouse 5 Pumphouse 3 on the corner of Reservoir Road and Franklin Avenue pumps water to Gitzel Street, 57 Street and the Tommy Forrest Park area Pumphouse 4 on Old Airport Road and Kam Lake Road carries water to the areas of Old Airport Road and Frame Lake south Pumphouse 5 on Butler Road serves as a booster station to maintain water pressure

From there it's pumped across the city.

On average, the city's five pump stations move eight million litres water per day at a rate of 80 to 100 litres a second. All of it has to be safe to drink.

"As a city, your number one priority is safe drinking water," says Formaniuk, who, as a pumphouse operator, also handles dispatch fire and medical calls while on duty at the pumphouse.

"You should never ever have to worry about what's coming out of your tap."

Currently, Yellowknife's system adds liquid chlorine and fluoride to incoming river water but the water isn't filtered.

The city's water supply has been disinfected with chlorine since 1939, when the government paid for Yellowknife's first water tank - a 10,000-gallon structure built on 'The Rock' near Jolliffe Island. It was only used in summer and was drained each winter before it froze. That was before trucked water delivery, when Yellowknife resident Tom Doornbos made his rounds around town, slinging buckets of water on his shoulders.

Now, the city has a brand new treatment plant in the works to keep up with potential future changes in federal drinking water standards.

The city's public works department has completed a water treatment test pilot project and expects to start designing a membrane filtration plant this winter to use in addition to chlorination. Yellowknife may the join the 16 out of 33 NWT communities currently using some type of water filtration.

While sampling the chlorinated water two to seven times every 24 hours helps the pumphouse operators ensure the water is sufficiently disinfected, particles of dirt or other matter can slip through the chlorination process in an unfiltered system and affect the water's clarity or cloudiness, also called turbidity.

The particles clouding the water provide homes for bacteria to grow and can decrease the effectiveness of chlorination.

An unusual amount of silt in the Yellowknife River caused the city's most recent boil-water advisory in 2004.

"High turbidity has given us problems in the past," says Formaniuk, who has worked at the pumphouse for nearly seven years. "Up here is so clean it's basically (particles of) sand and peat moss."

In a 2004 revision to its Guidelines for Canadian Drinking Water Quality, a federal-provincial-territorial committee on health and the environment tightened turbidity limits for water.

In accordance with the new guidelines, the GNWT Department of Municipal and Community Affairs (MACA) started construction this summer on an $11.5 million project for five new filtration treatment plants in the communities of Aklavik, Deline, Edzo, Tuktoyaktuk and Ulukhaktok.

The GNWT has seven treatment plants in various stages of design since 2007, when it stopped funding treatment plants in small communities.

Eleanor Young, director of MACA community operations, says the new drinking water guidelines did play a part in the decision to build new filtration plants but she doesn't see a trend towards filtered water treatment across the NWT.

"These are guidelines, not laws but we would encourage them to follow that," Young said. "The makeup of the water varies in each of the communities. Some of our communities are very lucky because they have a good quality of water."

The treatment plant is one of several water system changes under consideration in Yellowknife following the now-complete reservoir cell expansion. The city has already projected bigger water infrastructure budgets for the next two years, reaching $3,078,000 for water distribution in 2010 with a five per cent increase in water and sewer rates for both 2009 and 2010.

One of the possible changes is switching the city's water source from Yellowknife River to Great Slave Lake.

Scot Gillard, the city's assistant superintendent of the water and sewer division, says the pipeline that carries water from the river to the main pumphouse at the end of 48 Street is about 40 years old and will soon reach the end of its lifetime.

The lake has quenched the city's thirst before - years ago it was also used for sewage - and Formaniuk says it's always an option in case something happens with the Yellowknife River source.

"If something happened to the pipeline, we could get our water from the lake," he says, pointing to a small control panel on the pumphouse wall. "Just by flicking one switch."

If the city does switch to Great Slave, it could get rid of pumphouse 2 at the Yellowknife River, which pumps water through the pipeline. Formaniuk says depending on which area of the lake the city chooses to draw from, water treatment could be more "cost effective" because of warm water spots in some areas of the lake, meaning the city could spend less money heating the water with steam boilers so it doesn't freeze in winter.

"Our water's very refreshing here," says Formaniuk. "We have to keep it flowing all the time."