Council approves water fix

The City of West Kelowna admits mistakes were made during the summer in identifying issues related to water quality.

Standing before council Tuesday evening, engineering manager Rob Hillis walked council through a detailed timeline of issues related to odour and discolouration of water coming from the Rose Valley Reservoir and through the new Rose Valley Water Treatment Plant.

Those issues affected some, but not all water users on the Rose Valley system.

Hillis admitted staff initially misdiagnosed the problem as being due to increased flows in the distribution system.

“On July 23 we received the first test results that indicated manganese had exceeded the maximum level,” Hillis told council.

“At that point it became clear the treatment plant was not removing dissolved manganese. The manganese would stay dissolved, run through our treatment facility where chlorine is required to be added to the water to maintain a chlorine residual through the system.

“That was interacting with the manganese, it was oxidizing and turning the water a brownish colour.”

Obviously, Hillis said, the city’s initial messaging was not correct.

“It was manganese that was the culprit, not flushing.”

He says the city updated its messaging at the end of July and through early August on its website.

An interim solution was put in place Aug. 2 to remove manganese by using chlorine as an oxidizing agent.

By the middle of October, he says manganese levels fell below Health Canada limits allowing the interim solution to be shut off.

In an effort to find a longer term solution, council unanimously approved the spending of $2.5 million from the Rose Valley water reserve fund.

The project planned for the reservoir includes aeration to help reduce levels of dissolved manganese and the addition of potassium permanganate to the water which allows the manganese to oxidize while the water travels to the treatment plant.

Council unanimously approved the expenditure.

However, a second proposal to give each of the 8,500 water users on the Rose Valley system a $50 credit was voted down.

“I’m struggling with this. This is a user pay system and the people that utilize the Rose Valley system are the ones that pay for it,” said Coun. Rick de Jong.

“My concern is we are giving people back their $50 credit now but we are going to need it back at some point because we accounted for it in the reserves in the first place.

“What I would rather do is have staff dig in to find more federal or provincial funding to give a true credit that doesn’t come out of our residents pockets.