St. Stephen municipal officials believe they have solved the issue that led to a nearly two-week boil water order in the community.
“It’s only today that I can say, fingers crossed, it looks like we’ve solved that problem,” Sean Morton, the deputy chief administrative officer, told council on Wednesday night.
Municipal staff were conducting normal maintenance on Jan. 29 when they encountered issues with a pump at the Maxwell Crossing pumping station.
The municipality later determined that the pump failure was due to a line running between the pump and well being constricted.
Crews replaced the line and were able to bring it and the new pump into service on Feb. 7, but testing done at the reservoir outlet the following day showed high levels of turbidity.
“There was more water moving than what had been moving in the past, stirred up a whole bunch of stuff in the system, that caused the boil order [on Feb. 8],” said Morton.
Once everything was put back together, the deputy CAO said they discovered there was a vacuum leak in the system.
“Vacuum leaks are a little bit different than a pressure leak. A pressure leak, it just pushes water out, and if it’s not too much we carry on,” he said.
“With a vacuum leak you can’t build any pressure, we were unable to move water, so we spent an extensive amount of time trying to find that and get it going.”
Crews faced considerable challenges in trying to find the source of the leak, according to Morton, particularly due to the weather.
“The day we went out to break ground, it was minus 25 Celsius. We had four feet of frost that we had to go through,” he said.
“We had an excavator there for two days breaking the frost so I could find the pipe that I was dealing with, and then put guys in the ground.”
Officials managed to isolate the problematic area last week and the boil water order was lifted on Feb. 21 after two acceptable test results.
While the problem has been fixed, Morton noted that the town has another water pump “that is most likely in the same state.”
“We’re going to have to look down the road at replacing some of this equipment that is old,” he added, noting the vacuum-based system is “archaic.”
Morton said they also had to replace the SCADA system, which notifies staff when there are issues at the pumping station.
“That was sending us bad information, and so we had a tech running around, it’s like the old operator, pulling the wire out of this one and putting it in this one to try and make it work, and literally bubble gum holding her together,” he said.
“Because that was failing, we had to have somebody there 24 hours a day, so we had people working seven days a week to be there to make sure something else didn’t blow up and go to pieces.”
The deputy CAO told council that staff are still adding up all of the costs involved with the repairs.
Officials encouraged residents to sign up for Alertable, which the municipality uses to send out emergency alerts such as boil water orders.
You can download an app or receive notifications by email, text message or phone call.
