25 days of boiling water
Mayor says city won't be reimbursing Kam Lake residents for dirty water tanks
John McFadden
Northern News Services
Friday, June 5, 2015
SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE
A Yellowknife city councillor says the city needs to get its priorities straight as a boil water advisory closes in on nearly a month with no immediate end in sight.
Boaters Gord Greening, left, Joey Sutton and Davidee Qaumariaq prepare to portage their canoe on the Yellowknife River above Bluefish dam on Saturday. The shoreline is about six feet below the high water mark, causing difficulties not only for boaters trying to navigate newly exposed reefs but for the intake pipe drawing water for the city from the much shallower Yellowknife River. - Mike W. Bryant/NNSL photo |
Coun. Niels Konge said this is a problem the city should have been able to sort out by now.
"But there are lots of things we can't seem to sort out," said Konge. "The water has been leaking near the Co-op for three years now and we can't sort that out. Where there is a will there's a way. As a council we certainly need to have priorities. I think we've invested way too much money in landscaping around Old Airport Road and the Government Dock, when we should be concentrating on what our core responsibilities are. Those, in my opinion, are water and sewers, roads, garbage and facilities to keep the kids busy."
Konge said he can't understand why the city went 11 years without a boil water advisory and is now enduring one substantially longer than the advisory in 2004. The boil water advisory in 2004 lasted 16 days; this year's is 25 days and counting.
"As a Kam Laker who only has tank services, it's going to be interesting to see how I am going to empty my tank just before the water truck shows up with water that doesn't need to be boiled," Konge said. "I think the city should be offering Kam Lakers a free (water) delivery, a free fill-up so we can get our tanks and all our systems cleaned out."
Mayor Mark Heyck said that isn't going to happen.
"These are events that are out of our control so we don't have resources to do that kind of thing," the mayor said. "It's something we all have to deal with and bear with and everybody with the city has to deal with it on a residential level as well. We just hope to get the new water treatment plant up and running as soon as possible."
With the installation of a membrane filtration system at the new $32-million water treatment plant, high turbidity levels (muddy water) won't be an issue in the future, Heyck said.
The turbidity level has reached 20 Nephelometric Turbidity Units (NTU) - a measure of turbidity - at times since the advisory. The allowable threshold is five.
NWT chief public health officer Andre Corriveau told Yellowknifer early testing at the treatment plant showed the filter gets the NTU down to 0.1.
The new plant could open later this month but Heyck said he isn't prepared to give a date for it just yet.
"I think the work has been proceeding on the water treatment plant as quickly as it possibly can so our goal is to have it up and operational sometime this month," Heyck said.
Coun. Cory Vanthuyne said the city is at the mercy of Mother Nature when it comes to these types of problems.
"The intake line (from the Yellowknife River), which is a 10-inch line and rather than being elevated and taking water from a river that was five or six feet deep, but and I'm speculating here, may be being taken from a river that's running only about three feet deep," said Vanthuyne. "So the intake line is much closer to the actual bottom of the river and is more susceptible to silt getting into the intake line. Unfortunately, the addition of chlorine doesn't help this process."
Because of the potential hazard of arsenic from Giant Mine getting into the waters of Yellowknife Bay, Vanthuyne said taking water from the much deeper Great Slave Lake is not a viable option. The river, on the other hand, is upstream from the mine, Vanthuyne pointed out.
