Mac Fraser, City of Powell River’s chief administrative officer, gave elected officials an update on the drinking water project at a recent committee-of-the-whole meeting.
The almost $9-million project included connecting the water main from Townsite to Wildwood, constructing a booster pump station at Aspen Avenue and Cedar Street and a UV (ultraviolet) facility and a two-celled reservoir that can hold about 7.75 million litres of water on Haslam Street.
The original budget for the project was $8.485 million. Two-thirds of the cost came from infrastructure stimulus funds from the federal and provincial governments, with the balance from the city.
Fraser said the contractor who built the reservoir damaged an in-line flow metre, which he described as “an important piece of our measuring infrastructure within the reservoir.”
The fix is at no cost to the city, which is the reason why it has taken a “bit of time,” Fraser said. “It wasn’t our fault, it won’t be our cost.”
Fraser added the project was done, “in a very busy time, in a hurry. The physical infrastructure is fine. We probably should have taken a little bit more time to tell the world what we were doing, consult with our neighbours to deal with issues around the site.”
Fraser said he has no concerns about the infrastructure, but he did have concerns about how it was commissioned in the community. “There’s no challenge to the ability to effectively and efficiently provide water to the city. What we need to do is go back and make sure that we’ve got all the details set. It’s as much a social issue with the people around us. We hurried. We had one conversation sometimes when we probably should have had two or three.”
Councillor Jim Palm reported that he attended a recent Wildwood Ratepayers’ Association meeting, where Dan Glover, Vancouver Coastal Health’s environmental health officer, explained how the facility operated in terms of the level of chlorine used in the system. “There were graphics produced by our engineering department that showed the residents how much chlorine was being added on a consistent basis,” he said. “I think what came out of the meeting was a better understanding by all residents in terms of their drinking water, that it is meeting all of the federal regulations and those levels of chlorine are being well monitored. We can even bring them down further so that when you initially turn your tap on and you get a whiff of chlorine, hopefully that will dissipate as time goes on.”
