After years of planning and execution, the water intake project for the City of Estevan is nearly finished.
And as it turns out, it’s a lot harder to switch a community’s primary water source than some might expect.
The initial tender came in well over budget, and had to be separated into three different phases. And once the work did begin, it didn’t always proceed smoothly, either, with issues related to encountering hard rock during the directional drilling phase, and a 400-metre sandstone slab to go through.
But the project is nearing completion. And we’ll see a benefit from it once it is finished.
A ceremony was held Thursday to mark near completion of this project, with the assorted officials you would expect to see and the speeches you would expect to hear. There’s still some work to be done, but this project is finally in the home stretch.
Once it’s finished and the city’s primary water source is shifted from Boundary Dam to Rafferty Dam, it’s expected that we’re going to have better water. Cleaner water. Better tasting water. Water that is softer, so it won’t be so hard on our taps.
We’re not sure just how noticeable this will be to the average person, whether they’ll find that the water from Rafferty tastes that much better than Boundary water. We’re also not sure if the average citizen will notice the water isn’t as hard, either.
But it should be cleaner.
Each month, the city releases its water quality report, with information on how much water was treated and pumped into the system. Most months, we hear that there weren’t any plant upsets, and that the city was within parameters set out by the provincial government for water quality, except for one: trihalomethanes (THMs).
And it will be noted that the THMs will be lower once this water intake project is finished.
Perhaps that will be the best way to quantifiably judge whether this project is a success: how low will the THMs be? We certainly hope that they’ll now fit within government standards, given the amount of money that was spent by the different levels of government on this water intake project.
This is a project that has been discussed for years. The city has known for some time that something had to be done to meet provincial standards for water quality. We’ve never found ourselves in a situation like Walkerton, Ont., or North Battleford at the turn of this century, but upgrades for Estevan were needed.
Without the support of the provincial and federal governments, this project wouldn’t have been completed at this time.
But eventually this project would have had to be completed anyways, and we might not have had the province or the feds helping us.
Once the different levels of government were on board, the city had to proceed with the project, even after the initial quotes for the project were well over budget.
If we would have received the green light for the water intake, and then told the other levels of government that we couldn’t do it, then you can be sure those levels of government would be very hesitant to fund local projects again in the future, other than those that are universally allocated with per capita support, such as through gas tax funding.
And now that this project is finished, it frees up the city to tackle other projects on the capital side for the water utility. When it comes to water and wastewater treatment, it’s a never-ending cycle of work to be done, as projects have to be completed and upgrades have to be made to meet changing standards.
Completion of this water intake project has been a long time coming.
We know there will be improvements. Let’s just hope they’re really noticeable because that will help justify this project to the general public.
