Local politicians have approved new policy to ensure water quality for Greater Vernon residents that will likely mean far fewer public notices. Greater Vernon Water staff say boil water notices or advisories should no longer be needed, unless there's a major incident. Greater Vernon Advisory Committee director Bob Fleming says the ability to switch customers between the Duteau Creek and Kalamalka Lake sources, is the reason. "That's relatively recent, in the last three or four years I believe, so we have that now and it gives us a lot of flexibility in the system and I think it protects the customer." Water quality manager Renee Clark says issuing public water notices, either a boil notice (BWN) or water quality advisory (WQA), is very labour intensive. "And if water quality notification occurs outside of regular work hours, staff are paid overtime. Switching sources is a fairly straight forward process from an operational perspective that does not consume a lot of operations time but does need to be orchestrated among the three operation groups (Vernon, Coldstream, RDNO)," says Clark in a report. Clark concludes by saying from both a customer and operator's perspective, "it is much more efficient to change the source water than issue a WQA or BWN." Since 2010, customers on the Kal Lake source have been switched to Duteau Creek water eight times due to high turbidity, while over that same period, Duteau Creek was switched off once.
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Don Quixote Note:
This was a screenshot of old system 2 hours and 18 minutes after last switch on March 28.
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| Screen Shot Sat. March 28 at 1:18PM |
http://www.rdno.ca/docs/March_2015_GVW_Monthly_Report.pdf
Water Quality Report for March has Turbidity levels shown for March leading up to switch from Mission Hill water source to Duteau Creek water source.
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