Water Quality During the Spring Runoff

It's spring.  Snow in the surrounding hills is melting.  As everyone here knows, this increases the sediment in the streams and rivers and makes our water source, Kootenay Lake, more murky, or turbid.

While increased turbidity isn't necessarily unsafe, it's considered an indication of risk.

If you want to read a short article from Interior Health, you can find it here:

http://www.interiorhealth.ca/YourEnvironment/DrinkingWater/Documents/turbidity.pdf

In our water system, we have several ways of dealing with turbidity and monitoring the safety of our system.

1. We filter the lake water and clean filters regularly
2. We treat with chlorine
3. We test chlorine levels regularly
4. We can also test for turbidity

Recent tests (as of April 30, 2013) show Lake water from our intakes (about 100 ft deep) to have a turbidity of around 3.5 NTU.  This would merit a water quality advisory if we were drinking unfiltered and untreated water. Anything over 5 NTU rates a boil water advisory.   After filtering and treating, turbidity measurements show around 0.5 NTU or less.  This is what you are getting in your taps and is considered "good" according to IHA.

Chlorine tests done every few days show a free chlorine level of around 0.5 ppm at the reservoir.  Sometimes it's bit higher, very occasionally, it drops below that level.  We aim to keep the free chlorine level at around 0.4 to 0.7 at the reservoir.

We also take water samples regularly to send in for bacteriological tests.  If bacteria were still in our drinking water, it would show up in our test results.  Fortunately, we have had quite a few years of negative results other than a small number of positive results following a drop in chlorine levels as a result of an equipment failure.  Generally our regular monitoring catches these situations before they become problems.

If anyone has questions or concerns about our water or would like more information about our testing procedure, contact us at prwus.info@gmail.com.

Pine Ridge Water Utility Society is owned and operated by members of the Society which is made up of residents of the Pine Ridge subdivision.  We depend on volunteers.

Tracking Down Leaks

 Over the past while, perhaps a few months, some of us have had this feeling that water use seemed to be unusually high.  As an example, in the past couple of weeks, we were running the lake pumps for 8 hours/night and only seeing an increase in reservoir level by 1 foot, about half what we would expect for that amount of pumping time.  Discussion between a few society members focused around where such a leak could possibly be.

The first problem in tracking down such a leak is that you'd expect to see some water lying around.  We're talking about a possible couple thousand gallons of water every day.  We looked around and saw nothing.  Meter readings at the end of March showed that water use at every residence was completely normal, so we abandoned the idea that someone was running a water slide/water park in their back yards.

Finally, we decided to start isolating parts of the subdivision and started with the lower west side of the system, turning the water off for most of one afternoon and running the lake pumps to see if a normal rise in reservoir level was restored.

With some relief, that is exactly what we saw happening.  So, where was that leak?  We happened to notice some water in a standpipe access pipe and then saw that the ground around one shutoff valve was a bit damp.  A few passes with a shovel revealed very saturated soil and when one property's water was turned off, the leak stopped.

We had an excavator in the next morning and the leak, tracked down to a small crack in a brass fitting, was repaired.  A good example of a $2 part in a $100 hole.

Thanks to Bill J and Dave for taking part of their day to fix the leak and the sleuthing that discovered the source.  With any luck, we should be back to running the lake pumps for 3 or 4 hours each night.