City’s move to well system is complete

Tap water in Whitehorse is no longer coming from the surface of Schwatka Lake.

Tap water in Whitehorse is no longer coming from the surface of Schwatka Lake.

As of Jan. 1, the city’s water supply has come entirely from underground wells instead of Schwatka Lake.

“After many years of hard work, the city has been able to switch its water supply from surface to 100 per cent ground water via underground aquifers in the Riverdale area,” Mayor Bev Buckway said in a statement Wednesday.

“These investments in underground wells will save taxpayers from having to build and staff a water treatment plant as well as tens of thousands of dollars a year in operating costs.”

The newest wells were developed with funding from federal gas tax revenues and mean the city meets all national drinking water standards while continuing to own and operate the system.

City engineering manager Wayne Tuck noted this morning the city began moving to a well system about six years ago.

That move began shortly after the federal government announced there would be making major changes to drinking water requirements following the 2000 Walkerton, Ont. tragedy that saw the community’s water contaminated with E. coli, causing several deaths.

The territory announced it would also change its drinking water standards.

“We knew they were coming,” Tuck said of the new guidelines.

That meant the city was faced with the choice of continuing to draw its water supply from Schwatka Lake and building an entirely new facility that would treat the water, or moving to an underground well system.

While Tuck acknowledges there are some additional costs to operating entirely through a well system compared to continuing what the city was doing with the lake water, he noted estimates of building and operating a treatment facility were about three times as much as the well system costs.

Staff also weren’t trained to operate a treatment plant, as they have been on wells.

“Our people are already trained to do that,” Tuck said.

An added bonus of moving to underground water is the reduced risk of contaminants such as giardia, Tuck said. The well system is also more sustainable, he said.

“While the city has been developing wells in the Riverdale area since the 1950s, considerable attention has been placed on this project over the past several years,” Tuck said. “These latest wells, known as 8 and 9, were completed in December at a cost of $1.5 million.”

Construction on the final projects did not come without some controversy.

The contract for the work was awarded to Ketza Construction following a dispute over the bid process that saw city officials take it to court for a legal opinion on who should get the contract.

Both Ketza and TSL Contractors had bid on the project, but Ketza’s bid was changed during the review of each contract due to a calculation error on the GST.

The change made Ketza’s the lowest of the two at $863,053 compared to TSL’s bid of $864,2000.

TSL took issue with the change, with the city eventually opting to put the matter to Yukon Supreme Court Justice Ron Veale, who ruled the city could award the work to Ketza over TSL.

The city has six wells in operation. Tuck noted the city had a couple of wells near F.H. Collins Secondary School built in the 1950s that were taken out of operation.

The city will continue working on well development, Tuck said, noting it now wants to look at developing a back-up system to avoid having to deal with any water reduction orders and so on.