WC148 MayJune 2026 - Magazine - Page 19
hill down towards the low-lift pumps and then into the bay,”
Wilhelm explains. “They took out a massive amount of rock
and had to dig deep to get the necessary depth for the reservoir
and everything else for the water treatment plant.”
To stop zebra mussels from clogging intake pipes, crews installed a brand-new pre-chlorination system—a line that doses
the mussels with a minute amount of sodium hypochlorite
when routine summertime inspections spot troublesome concentrations of the invasive species. “If there’s more accumulation
than expected, the inspection team will scrub clean all the zebra
mussels,” Wilhelm says. “That’s essentially what we did at the
old plant, when our pre-chlorination system wasn’t working.”
Another key project component is a new UV system to replace one that was malfunctioning. “The old one had six lamps
that were about four feet long, and the new one has just two
lamps that are about a foot long, so they’re more efficient and
have a smaller footprint,” Wilhelm says.
New low-lift pumps also mark a considerable improvement.
“Our old plant was all pressurized, so our flocculation, sedimentation and filtration weren’t the best. We’ve now fully optimized
it, and it’s producing very clean water in terms of turbidity.”
Storage capacity has also more than doubled. The new water
tower holds roughly 454,000 litres, and the new reservoir
underneath the treatment plant, when full, holds an additional
600,000 litres. “We didn’t have a reservoir before, so that was a
big vulnerability,” Wilhelm says. “If you don’t have a reservoir,
you don’t have any contact time. In every water treatment plant,
your chemicals interact with the water for a certain amount of
time to give you the proper results that you need. The old water
treatment plant never met those requirements, but the new
plant meets them tenfold.”
The project centerpiece, of course, is the new plant itself.
Wilhelm describes it as a conventional treatment system with
up-flow clarifiers, two sets of filters—one mixed-media filter
with anthracite and sand, and a second carbon filter designed
to tackle taste and odour issues. The plant also has a supervisory
control and data acquisition (SCADA) system. “It’s standard in
a lot of plants and factories,” Wilhelm says, calling it the brains
of the operation.
As with any new technology installation, the project team
encountered minor hiccups integrating SCADA with the filtration system. “Everything just had to line up, and when you’re
working with different sets of codes that can be a challenge,”
Wilhelm says. “But we have about 99 per cent of all that ironed
out.”
The other major facet of the project was to address leaks
which were draining a staggering 650,000 litres daily from
the system’s 27-kilometres of mostly PVC distribution pipe.
That’s roughly 60 to 70 per cent of the overall supply, and the
pre-construction inspection in 2020 discovered farm-grade pipe
and even small lengths of garden hose, mostly where the system
WAT E R C A N A D A . N E T
connected to private dwellings. Wilhelm describes some leaks
as lower pressure-rated pipe developing pinhole-size leaks, and
some instances where installation wasn’t done properly. “The
leaks would develop and get bigger over time.”
Crews repaired the leaks they found, bringing sub-par
sections up to code, and added an additional 14.5 kilometres
of watermain to the network. “We had 300 service connections
redone to service every single residence and band building,”
Wilhelm says. “And we installed two valve chambers for the
booster stations, an isolation chamber to separate our distribution system into two different pressure zones, and about 100
new fire hydrants,” Wilhelm says.
The project also brought the typical logistical challenges that
occur with many water projects. When service lines needed to
be disconnected for more than a few hours, the water department installed temporary above-ground watermains which drew
from fire hydrants. The project team even briefly ran a water
bottle distribution program. The transition between the old and
new plants went smoothly, with valves installed to operate each
system in isolation. “On the day of the switchover we opened
the valves for the new plant, closed the valves for the old plant,
and then ran the new system,” Wilhelm says. “We never lost
any of the pressurization from the old plant, so the switchover
was fairly seamless.”
When the plant went live in October 2024, the plan was to
continue system tests and lift the boil-water advisory once given
the all-clear. Five months later, however, even as crews concluded repairs to what they thought would be the final remaining
leaks, a considerable number of new ones opened across the
system, bringing water loss numbers back to roughly where they
were pre-construction. “We were in very good spirits after the
plant was commissioned,” Wilhelm says. “We got through the
wintertime no problem, everything was running great, and then
we had all these leaks open up. We have ideas of where they are
but haven’t pinpointed them all yet.” A complicated topography
with considerable rock and clay doesn’t help. “In some cases, we
might have a leak open up in one location but not see the water
for a kilometre or more,” Wilhelm says.
The project team is engaging a third-party leak detection
specialist to help plan next steps. “It will likely be one of those
things we systematically take care of it as much as we can and as
quickly as we can, but it’s probably going to take a few years to
tackle all of it,” Wilhelm says, not ruling out the need to replace
entire swaths of piping, or even the entire distribution network.
While the integrity of the distribution system remains
unknown, the community has the clear advantage knowing
the new plant, in producing clean, potable water, ultimately
facilitates whatever work might remain on the distribution side.
“With the leaks we have right now, the old plant would not
have been able to keep up, whereas we’re now pretty much able
to keep up with demand,” Wilhelm says.
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