If you follow the news you can’t help but come across stories about the water issues in Flint, Michigan.
Due to decisions by state government officials the drinking water has become awash with lead, with some blood samples showing two to three times the concentration of lead toxic to humans.
It was 15 years ago the tragedy in Walkerton struck, as drinking water was infected with E. Coli, with seven people dying and thousands falling ill. In 2003, in response to changes to water quality standards at the federal level due to Walkerton, the B.C. government introduced the Drinking Water Protection Act.
The soft deadline for water system upgrade completion was 2015 which is why we have seen so much activity in valley communities during the last two years. Non-compliance could result in fines of as much as $100,000 per day among other penalties.
As of the end of last year most communities had completed or were in the final stages of their upgrades. Lead by the health authorities — the organization tasked with enforcing the new standards — communities have been strongly encouraged to move away from surface water sources which are far more easily contaminated than ground water sources, and to upgrade water purification systems.
Living where we do, it’s easy to take the purity of our drinking water for granted.
It’s also easy to be critical of the cost of these upgrades, where residents in some communities have had parcel taxes applied resulting in hundreds of dollars per year in additional taxes allocated to paying down the capital debt.
We should be heartened to see the elimination of the wave of drinking water and boil water advisories that arrived with the freshet each spring.
Some valley communities have been waiting more than a decade to drink water from their taps. So what is the alternative? We need only to look at Flint and Walkerton to see them.
