MAINTENANCE & INFRACTRUCTURE PROBLEMS HIT K-W WATER SUPPLY

The title of the Waterloo Region Record front page Local Section story last Friday was "Water station down to one pump". Regional Councillor Jim Wideman, as expected, makes comforting noises about built in redundancies as does Thomas Schmidt, commissioner of transportation and environmental services. Apparently having three pumps for two reservoirs is considered by them to be a built in redundancy. Unfortunately there is a problem with their definition of redundancy. If they had real redundancy available then the one remaining pump would be able to pump out both reservoirs at a rate to keep up with demand. What I'm reading however indicates that one reservoir uses two pumps each at 420 litres per second and the other reservoir uses one pump at 840 litres per second. If it was the two smaller pumps that went down then the one remaining pump (840 l/s) could sucessfully pump from one reservoir thus reducing by 50% the quantity of water available from the Grand River. On the other hand if it was one of the smaller pumps plus the bigger 840 l/s pump that went down then the scenario is that 3/4 of our Grand River capacity has been reduced as the one remaining 420 l/s pump presumably can only pump 1/2 as much from one reservoir.

The Region of Waterloo have their own tradespersons available for emergency work. What apparently they haven't yet figured out is that tradespersons need the parts to install on a timely basis. Seven weeks awaiting for two pumps is simply ridiculous. These should have been bought and kept available as replacements years ago. This is not good management for something as vital as our public water system.