The manager of Estevan's water treatment plant says the City is well prepared to act if the facility were to go down for any length of time.
Kevin Sutter said Estevan has a number of protocols in place and a significant amount of water in reserve should something happen to the plant.
The issue came into the provincial spotlight recently after the Buffalo Pound Water Treatment Plant, which provides water to Regina and Moose Jaw as well as a number of smaller communities in the area, shut down because of an electrical problem Jan. 6. It was back in operation the next day but created some hectic moments for officials in the affected communities as they had to alert the public of the issue and ask them to curb their water consumption until the problem was rectified.
Sutter said the City has a waterworks emergency response planning document which he created in 2002 and has revised a few times since. He noted the first order of business would be to assemble a team of City employees that would respond to any particular emergency involving the plant, be it a breakdown or some sort of contamination issue.
"We set up three goals - life safety is the first goal, fire suppression is the second goal and public health would be the next goal," Sutter said. "For life safety, we have to make sure the water is clean and safe to drink; fire suppression, that we have the volume and pressure to distribute that water and public health would be more for in the hospitals and what we would do in those areas if there was a problem."
Sutter said the City would also begin contacting area schools, restaurants and commercial and industrial customers to inform them of any issues and to also ask them to curb their water usage.
The document also contains what Sutter described as triggering events that would force the City into action.
"(For example) the treatment process had to shut down because it wasn't meeting the quality control for whatever reason" he said. "A contamination of the source water, a breakdown in the plant processes, distribution problems, high turbidity for whatever reason. We listed all these events and the steps that we would take."
Asked how much water the City has in reserve should a problem arise, Sutter said although that figure depends on a variety of factors such as time of day and at what point of the year the emergency were to take place, they usually have roughly 1.75 million gallons on hand.
"We work off an upfill and draw type reserve so overnight we shut down the plant and pump from reserves so in the morning the reserves are lower than they are in the evening when everything is topped off," he said.
"If something happened in the morning in the middle of summer on the hottest day, it would be a bigger emergency than in the evening in the winter time. On an average day we're using just over a million gallons of water. Plus in the tower we like to keep a certain amount of water for firefighting reasons so we say we are empty when the tower is empty. So using that analogy we have about 24 hours of water supply and we say it would last probably longer because if there was that big of an emergency we would do a lot of the things Regina did trying to get people to stop using water."
Sutter said the City is currently is in the midst of planning another water reservoir in the north end of Estevan which would help them meet their goal of having two million gallons in reserve.
