Top marks for Norfolk’s water treatment plants | Spare News | pentictonherald.ca

Stephanie Davis, Norfolk’s director of environmental services, said the county’s five water treatment systems “did very well” last year, according to a provincial inspectors.

Of the 15 adverse water quality incidents reported in Norfolk County last year, one got a bit messy.

During reconstruction of Talbot Street in downtown Simcoe last May, a contractor mistakenly pulled a length of pipe out of the ground, leaving sewage flowing into two open-ended pipes and headed for nearby homes and businesses.

“Our operations staff were on site within less than five minutes,” said Stephanie Davis, Norfolk’s director of environmental services.

Work crews quickly cut off water to all properties connected to the affected water main “just so there was no chance of any contamination getting into a resident’s water supply,” Davis told The Spectator.

The county gave residents bottled water to use while workers flushed out the system. The affected area was “super chlorinated” for more than three hours before the water mains were flushed normally.

The process was then repeated to make sure the system was free of contaminants.

Service was restored two days after the disruption, but residents were advised to boil water in the interim. After further microbiological testing, and with input from the province and the health unit, the boil water advisory was lifted two days later.

The springtime incident did cause some damage — a local community theatre had to rip out its basement carpet and toss some soiled costumes, while removing the sewage from the basement of a nearby church delayed the opening of Simcoe’s seasonal homeless shelter.

But Davis said fast action from county workers meant residents were never at risk.

“Staff were able to react and address the situation quickly to ensure that the drinking water was safe at all times,” she said.

“Because the water’s always moving in the system, so without that rapid response, your area of possible contamination becomes a lot larger.”

As a legacy of the Walkerton tainted water scandal, the province mandates municipalities report annually on any deficiencies in water quality and quantity.

“Overall, our systems performed very well,” Davis told councillors at the March 11 meeting.

Most adverse water quality incidents in 2024 were due to false positives or technical glitches that were swiftly noticed and corrected, with subsequent testing showing no appreciable degradation in water quality.

As a large, but sparsely populated, rural county, Norfolk has five separate municipal water systems supplying the county’s urban centres.

After inspecting each system and analyzing “thousands” of water samples, the province flagged three instances of noncompliance with regulations, but Davis said the infractions were largely “administrative in nature.”

“At no time in 2024 was there any significant risk to human health, the safety of the county’s water supply or the natural environment,” she told council.

There was one issue in the Delhi-Courtland system where operators were late in reporting a water quality incident, while in Waterford, an operator failed to review water quality test results within the mandated 72 hours.

The operators had refresher training and the ministry took no further action, deeming the two systems to be over 97 per cent compliant.

Ministry inspectors gave perfect scores to the water systems in Port Dover, Port Rowan and Simcoe, with no examples of noncompliance.

Those high marks are a point of pride for Davis and her team.

“All of our staff are local. They all live in Norfolk County or very close by,” she told The Spectator.

“They have a lot of responsibility, and they know that, so they take it to heart.”

Work crews take the time to chat with residents and answer questions about how the water system works, she added.

“It’s their community that they’re working in, and I think they really appreciate what they do and how they’re serving the public,” she said.

Residents may not give thanks for Norfolk’s water treatment system every time they run the faucet, but they are quick to call when something looks or tastes off.

“That’s when people do tend to think about us a bit more — when you turn on the tap and it’s discoloured, or you don’t have that water pressure there,” Davis said.

Inspection is key, she added, as regulatory authorities “hold us accountable” by flagging any issues within the high-tech system.

“And we fix it as soon as possible, because what we don’t address is going to affect something else down the line,” Davis said.

“When that ministry inspector doesn’t find anything and doesn’t have any recommendations, that’s a really good year for us.”

Ministry analysis showed no issue with the volume of drinking water available in Norfolk’s urban areas, with each of the plants operating under capacity, save for Port Dover’s, which is currently undergoing capacity upgrades.

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