Fixing 100 Mile House’s water supply is the top priority for the District of 100 Mile House.
At a Committee of the Whole meeting on Tuesday, Jan. 23 staff shared with mayor and council potential ways to mitigate or eliminate the problem. Mayor Maureen Pinkney said that no matter what solution they decide upon, the cost is going to be high.
“The biggest question on everyone’s mind in our community is our water. The well water is really hard,” Pinkney said. “No matter what decision we make it’s going to be extremely expensive. So we have to be absolutely sure we’re making, without a doubt, the best decision moving forward.”
100 Mile House has had a remarkably hard water supply ever since 2017 when the district drilled a 600-foot-deep well into a large aquifer. At the time Pinkney said council was told that the water would be hard in the short term, but over time the minerals in the water would be filtered out and the water would become soft.
Almost seven years later, this has proven to not be the case. Pinkney said that while they’re able to treat the manganese and iron in the water, calcium carbonate and carbon dioxide have proven trickier to treat. While safe to drink, they both play havoc on the community’s copper piping, corroding and breaking them down over time. The chemicals and additives the district has tried adding to the water to coat them have proven ineffective, as they simply wear off.
READ MORE: Water treatment plants in commission for 100 Mile House and 108 Mile Ranch
“As water sits in the lines of your house (the calcium carbonate and carbon dioxide) is falling back apart and will still continue to do that damage. If we add lime it will soften it in most areas but anything that is heated like hot water tanks, coffee pots, you name it, that (treatment) will not hold up,” Pinkney said.
There are three main solutions that the district is evaluating at this time, Pinkney said. She remarked staff have done their due diligence by researching similar issues across the world.
“We have such hard water its extremely rare to find anybody with as hard water as we do. The place we’ve been comparing ourselves to is Denmark,” Pinkney said. “Typically they figure it’s just a mineral deposit but this obviously is not a deposit, these minerals seem to be throughout the whole water aquifer.”
The first solution would be installing a new water treatment plant beside the well to treat the hard water. Pinkney said it will cost at least $5 million to build the plant and there will be “huge operating costs” to keep it running once built. Complicating the option is that Interior Health will have to sign off on whatever additives they add to the water and there’s a chance whatever they go with may not be effective.
Another alternative would be switching 100 Mile’s water supply back to Bridge Creek, which the community relied on for decades. However, Pinkney said the current drought B.C. is in right now has shown the vulnerability of such a solution
Moreover, they would need to upgrade the old sand filtration system used to treat the water, which would also cost around $5 million. Should the creek ever dry up or become dangerously low, the district would then be forced to use the hard well water again, solving nothing and wasting a lot of money.
Finally, there was a proposal in 2008 to pipe water from Horse Lake into town. This by far would be the most costly project, quoted at $7 million to council in 2008 and Pinkney said it would likely be closer to $21 million today. If that is the option they end up choosing Pinkney plans to ask the province for funding as 100 Mile House could not afford such a costly project.
Whatever decision they end up making, Pinkney and council are aware they’ll have to make it soon. Whenever they’ve had to replace sections of the town’s water mains in recent years she has been shocked by how corroded the pipes and valves are.
“We’re at a critical stage when we are affecting our own infrastructure and if we can’t stop it we won’t even be able to fix stuff eventually. You can’t just keep pouring money into repairs,” Pinkney said.
Following staff’s presentation last week, Pinkney and council had several questions they wanted answered which have been sent to the district’s contractors and engineers. She reiterated that fixing the water remains council’s highest priority going forward.
“It seems like it’s been going on for so many years that we’ve been doing nothing but we have been researching and it’s been on the forefront. Now it’s just really apparent how bad it’s affecting everything. It’s critical, it’s number one and as fast as we can get it done we’ll get it done,” Pinkney pledged. “That could still be two years out. We’re going to need lots of authorization from other levels of government and funding.”
