With what happened in Calgary still fresh in everyone’s mind, the district has approved $30,000 to bring in contractors to inspect the District’s water lines.
The concerns are not unfounded. According to a report by Jason Bradley, Director of Operations and Infrastructure, the utilities department noticed a change in water flow rates on the main line coming from the water wells to the Water Treatment Facility back in December of last year. “At that time, we had recently installed new instrumentation to assist in the monitoring of the system and were unsure of the accuracy of the newly installed instruments,” says Bradley. “The district has had an outside contractor assisting with the telemetry to insure the accuracy of the system. The district then moved towards suspected areas to perform test digs at various valves along the pipeline including a dig at our repair site from fall of 2022.”
Despite all the work they put in, he says there has been no sign of a leak at any of the places they checked out. “During the winter months, the utilities department continued to monitor the potential leak for changes in the system,” he says. “They have utilized our own Leak Detection Equipment in coming to the conclusion that there may be a potential leak.”
However, he says, they are unable to find the source of the potential leak. “The equipment and training within the District have limitations in pin pointing the location of the leak,” he says.
And it might not be a leak; right now they are not seeing a reduction in water supply. Rather, he says, the pumps are running longer. “There could be a correlation between that and the number of people in town running water.”
But a leak is the most likely culprit, so rather than wait for things to get worse, he says it would be better to bring in outside specialists to determine if there is actually a leak, and to find its location.
At the moment, the issue is not adversely affecting the district’s ability to get water to the town. “The district has not seen any further reduction in supply to the Water Treatment Facility, although the wells have seen an increase in operating times,” says Bradley. “At this time there is no concern of contamination to the system as the Utilities Department has been continuously monitoring the system for changes. The leak has not yet surfaced which is the reason for the request for outside specialist’s assistance.”
He says that it will take about ten days for the specialists to inspect the District’s water distribution system, which includes 44 km of pipes, 1598 service connections and 154 hydrants over three different pressure zones.”
Trent is the publisher of Tumbler RidgeLines.
