High Water

 
 A cool, wet spring accompanied with unusual amounts of rain contributed to one of the highest water levels in Kootenay Lake this year since 1974.


This picture shows how close the high water came to the intake building which houses the electronics for the pumps.


One radio commentator I heard today noted that if it wasn't for the dams on the Kootenay River, the water level in the Lake could have been as much as 7 feet higher.

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.

Water Volume...By the Numbers

I was playing around with some numbers earlier today and came up with the following possibly interesting facts:

All of the main waterline from the Treatment Building up to the reservoir and down to the beginning of Pineridge Rd is 6" plastic pipe. Each 100 meters of this pipe will hold about 1766 litres. That's 1.77 m3 (cubic meters). For the metrically challenged, that's about 467 US gallons or 388 Imperial gallons. I haven't actually measured the approximate length of pipe our system would have, but it could be around 1 km (1000 meters)?

When we're filling the reservoir, we're pumping about 20 US gallons per minute. That's 1200 US gallons per hour or about 4500 litres (4.5 m3) per hour. That means it takes about 20 minutes to fill each 100 meters of our 6 inch plastic mainline.