By Andrew de Souza

$13M water treatment plant contract approved

Mar 16, 2011 | 6:24 AM

City council has approved the second and final phase of upgrades to the city’s water treatment plant with a tender for more than $13 million.

On Monday council voted in favour of awarding the contract to Wildstone Construction out of Penticton, British Columbia for $13.4 million.

The major focus of the company’s contract will be to install a new clarifier, central component of a treatment facility that reduces suspended particles in water. Currently, the plant uses a 25-year-old gravity based system, which will be replaced with a sand-based system known as an Actiflow.

“We’ve looked at all our older and inefficient equipment and said, ‘what do we need to do to ensure that it stays reliable, so that it doesn’t break, that it’s more effective and that it’s less expensive to run,” said the city’s director of capital projects and planning Scott Golding.

The contract also includes a lot of work in different areas of the plant to improve public safety and efficiency and also upgrade the plant’s antiquated control system.

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Golding said the city has set an ambitious construction schedule, with the hope that all work will be completed in 2012.

Once all work is complete, the facility will have more redundancies, be able to work at a consistent level throughout the year and be easier on employees and safer for residents.

It’s also expected to increase the plant’s capacity by about 50 per cent up from its current rate of 45 million litres per day.

“Before the upgrades, we were getting to the limit of what we could place and now we’re quite comfortable again,” Golding said.

The city will spend approximately $26 million on the upgrades, with about $8 million coming from city coffers and the remaining money coming from the provincial and federal governments through the Build Canada Fund and the New Deal/Gas Tax programs.

Upgrades required by province

The work was necessitated after the highly-publicized water safety issues in Walkerton, Ontario and North Battleford.

After those incidents, the province tightened regulations for water plants and required an assessment for every plant in the province to be conducted every five years.

In 2006, one was conducted in Prince Albert, and it was determined that the city needed to make some upgrades to remain in compliance with the new, stricter regulations.

The city needed to increase the time chlorine compounds were in contact with the water supply, or install other systems.

“We had a problem with the regulator where we were out of compliance with the terms of our operating permit,” said Golding.

“Basically the regulator had some concerns with the effectiveness of our disinfection method.”

As well, seasonal variance of the North Saskatchewan River played a large role. The city’s current system requires water drawn from the lake to have a minimum amount of suspended solids, or turbidity in order to create a layer of sludge in the clarifier that acts as a filter.

However, in the winter, the water is actually too clean and the clarifier cannot maintain a layer of sludge and addition processes are needed to ensure safe drinking water.

Further, that clarifier is the only system in the plant that has no redundancy.

The clarifiers that will be installed in the contract will not only operate effectively throughout the year, they will also have built in redundancies.

The city has also installed UV filters to increase disinfection of the water. They’ve already been installed and will begin officially operating in April.

More work to be done in the future

The total costs come in at about $26 million, the city still won’t be able to be do everything it wants or needs to do.

Golding explained that with limited funds, the city and designers had to come together and decide on priorities.

“Based on that analysis, items that were related to making good water or ensuring the safety of the water supply emerged as priorities,” he said.

Golding said the remaining projects included increasing water production, structural projects not related to water safety, and other things such as green energy efficiencies.

However, he added those projects would remain as consideration should addition funding come available in the future.

In the meantime, Golding said he was satisfied with the way the projects were being done and the level of service it would provide to the citizens.

“We should be in good shape for the foreseeable future,” he said.

adesouza@panow.com