‘We’re still working on this:’ Brown water still persists in Winnipeg

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This article was published 04/08/2017 (2997 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Incidents of discoloured or “brown” water keep popping up in household water taps across the city despite ongoing efforts to clean up Winnipeg’s underground water lines.

"It’s very, very frustrating. You never know when it’s going to hit," said Brenda Maxwell, a North Kildonan resident who suffered through discoloured water on Monday. "I went to make tea in the morning and I couldn’t. We had discoloured water all day. The water was still discoloured when we went to bed."

The water and waste department says cleanup efforts have cut the number of reported incidents by almost a third since the massive discoloured outbreak in 2013, which was blamed on the presence of manganese in ferric chloride, the coagulant substance used, ironically, to help keep the city’s drinking water crystal clear.

“We’re still working on this, we’re still working for the ultimate solution,” said Tim Shanks, the city’s manager of water services. “We’re going to get this resolved. We’ve made improvements but we’re not there yet.”

North Kildonan Coun. Jeff Browaty said there were a large number of reports of discoloured water from households across the ward in July, adding the progress the water and waste department is making isn’t good enough.

"The one municipal service where getting it right 99 per cent of the time simply isn’t good enough is the delivery of clean and safe drinking water," Browaty said, adding the department needs to do a better job up updating the public on its progress.

Shanks said what was happening in North Kildonan is not out of the ordinary, adding there were a similar number of complaints right across the city in July.

“It’s certainly not specific or isolated to North Kildonan,” Shanks said. “Every area of town is susceptible to occurrences like this.”

Reported incidents of discoloured tap water had been fairly consistent for years– about 100 a month during the summer – but the reports started to rise after the city built a new water treatment plant in 2009. The numbers took a dramatic jump in the summer of 2013. Instead of the typical 100 reports a month, August 2013 saw more than 1,500 reports and a total of 5,182 for the year. There were 2,613 reports for all of 2012.

The 2013 situation prompted a review of the city’s water system to determine the cause and develop a plan to resolve the issue.

The discoloured water was found to caused by the presence of manganese, a harmless component of the substance added to the city’s water supply as a coagulant, which binds smaller solids and makes it, ironically, easier to clean the water.

One of the solutions was to fast-track the flushing program for the city’s water lines. The flushing minimizes the build-up of manganese.

Previously, it took the city six years to flush out all the water lines. Shanks said the city committed to flushing all the lines over three summers. A city-wide cycle was begun in 2014 and completed last summer and the city has begun another round this summer.

“This is as much as we can physically do to prevent any kind of substantial build-up of manganese,” Shanks said. “It will reduce the probability of a recurrence.”

Maxwell has been monitoring the city’s clean-up efforts for the past four years, after she was one of the first residents to identify the severity of the problem back in 2013.

"It’s taking (the city) a long time," Maxwell said. "I’m paying for service that I’m not getting. On Monday, I had to go out and buy water to make dinner because I couldn’t use the tap water."

The city’s original commitment was to return the number of reported complaints back to the pre-2013 levels of about 100 a month. Shanks said the number for this past June and July show they haven’t reached that goal yet – there were 467 reports in June and 298 reports in July.

“I understand it’s very frustrating for customers and we’re working very hard on this,” Shanks said. “We’re still working on a long-term solution and until then, we’re still susceptible to these events."

Shanks said that up to the end of July, the city had received a total 1,422 reports of discoloured water. He said he expects there will be another 400-500 reports for the rest of the year, which would place the total number of episodes similar to the 1,952 that were reported in 2016.

Browaty said the water and waste department hasn’t been sharing with the public what it’s been doing to deal with discoloured water.

"I’m happy to see work is progressing towards an ultimate solution but more frequent updates to the public should be part of the department’s program," Browaty said in an email exchange with the Free Press. "It would be helpful to receive a time frame from the department as to when a new coagulant will be deployed and another round of pipe flushing completed so that we can hold them to account with a deadline when Winnipeggers can expect clear water except under exceptional circumstances."

The city’s ultimate goal is to replace ferric chloride as the coagulant with another compound. Shanks said one of the city’s first moves was to replace the ferric chloride with another brand with a significantly lower manganese component.

"That made a big difference right off the bat," Shanks said. The number of reported incidents were cut in half for 2014. "But we’re only ever going to see incremental improvements until we change the coagulant."

As part of the review following 2013, a pilot plant was built to test and find a replacement coagulant that doesn’t include manganese. Shanks said testing of various coagulants began in the winter and should be completed by the spring of 2018. Once a new coagulant is chosen and put into use, he said the city will review its fast-track flushing program to see if it needs to be modified.

“We’re not where we want to be yet,” Shanks said. “Customers are still experiencing extended discoloured water episodes. While it’s not a health concern, it’s still very inconvenient and very frustrating for customers to see discoloured water coming out of the tap.”

aldo.santin@freepress.mb.ca

2014 Discoloured Water Investigation Report