ELMIRA & ST. JACOBS TAP WATER

Following is part of the reason why I would eventually like to see our drinking water in Elmira and St. Jacobs come from our own local sources. Each year the Region of Waterloo put out a Public Notice titled Water Supply Notice. This year's report came out a couple of weeks ago and is based on testing done throughout 2012. While the Region apparently comply with province of Ontario (Ministry of the Environment) guidelines, quite frankly that doesn't mean much. There is an astounding list of industrial chemicals that are not included, some of which are quite common if not ubiquitous in our groundwater. This may well be why they aren't included in the first place. Also each year there are unexplained long term shutdowns of supply wells which is very disconcerting. These wells have been in production for decades and it sure isn't as if our summers are getting wetter and our population smaller, hence the huge question is why are these wells being shut down .

This information is on the Region of Waterloo's website and is accessed under "About the Environment", Quality & Treatment. Our local water comes via pipeline from the City of Waterloo and was installed in the very early 90's when the two Elmira wellfields were shut down due to NDMA and so much more. There are many groundwater wells pumping into either the William St. System or the Erb St. System. Both of these systems have wells that were shut down for extended periods of time. In the case of the Erb St System there does seem to be some sort of change underway in their pipng systems which I will look into further. In the case of the William St. System there are four wells named W1B, W1C, W2 and W3. "*Well W1B was offline for 13 weeks in 2012. W1C was offline for 4 weeks in 2012. Well W2 was offline for 2 weeks in 2012. Well W3 was offline for all of 2012.". I would be very interested in seeing some documentation about these longer term shutdowns. For example a one or two week shutdown could possibly be chalked up to routine annual maintenance, pump repairs, cleaning etc.

The piece de resistance is the joys of neverending trichloroethylene in the groundwater. This TCE is the long term result of a number of now defunct manufacturing industries immediately west of downtown King St. in Waterloo. There are levels of TCE at just below 1/2 the drinking water standard of 5 parts per billion (ppb). This Ontario drinking water standard is considered unacceptably high in a number of U.S. jurisdictions who prefer 1.5 to 3 ppb. What I can't determine but suspect is that these levels in the 2.0 ppb. range are probably the result of mixing and diluting within the four supply wells. At the same time if these wells are close enough together then all four are probably contaminated although different depths of wellscreens could certainly alter the concentrations. This is the water locals have been drinking for decades from the William St. wellfield. Elmira and St. Jacobs to date have only been drinking it since as stated the early 90's. I will be following up with further examination of these wells and others in the 2012 Annual Water Quality Report.