Field Trip - Ymir Treatment System

As part of my own little field-trip day, I visited the water treatment system at Ymir. This is a small community of 200+ people between Nelson and Salmo. It gets it's water from a surface supply (a stream west of town) and has a new treatment system operated by RDCK.

The Regional District took over Ymir's water system a few years ago, and installed a modern treatment system. I visited the plant with one of the RDCK's techs who was there to do some routine testing.

The plant pumps stream water through 3 large tanks that contain sand filters, then through a set of 5 micron and 1 micron cartridge filters, then through a set of parallel UV tubes and finally past a chlorine injector system. All system parameters are monitored in real time and the computer controlling this can be accessed by the techs from any of their computers.

Some pictures of the inside of the treatment plant are here.

RDCK has had, up to this fall, 16 water systems that they manage. After this fall/winter, they will be adding 3 more systems.

Conferring with Interior Health

Took part of the day Wednesday to go on a bit of a field trip. One objective was to see the water treatment at Ymir (see next post), and the second objective was to meet with Renee Ansell, Interior Health's Water Safety Officer.

The meeting in Nelson was quite productive; it was useful to discuss some of the issues we're looking at with our water system. We discussed how we might best consider a Cross Contamination Control Program (CCCP), where the most likely sources of contamination might be and what would be effective ways to deal with them.

We also talked briefly about a couple of possible maintenance issues and potential upgrades and what we would need to do before we start those projects.

It was also nice to hear that our water system is well-regarded in the way we operate our system. Always nice to know the regulator is happy with what we're doing.