Weyburn residents, along with those area residents who use city-treated water, are right to be concerned, even upset, that the city is subject to its second precautionary boil-water advisory in the past couple of weeks. To make this advisory worse, this one may last a lot longer than the first one did, making the situation very inconvenient and costly for everybody.
The City of Weyburn is getting a lot of questions about why this is happening, so council made the right move by hiring ATAP Consulting and Associated Engineering to do a thorough study into the water treatment facility, to find out exactly why this is happening, and what the city needs to do about it.
The water treatment facility involves a lot of complicated equipment, chemicals and exacting standards for water quality so it's suitable for consumption by the residents of Weyburn and area; therefore the study by the engineers may take some time to do completely and correctly.
While this will be inconvenient for everyone concerned, it is crucial to get this right so everyone's concerns and questions can be put to rest, and people can rest in the knowledge they can safely drink the water.
The other aspect to this latest advisory was the timing and the manner in which people were informed about the advisory. Unfortunately, the city had nothing whatsoever to do with the timing - it was Sask. Environment which informed the City, at midnight on Feb. 24, so most people were finding during the day Feb. 25 and 26; the city even had word that some people didn't find out until March 1, but this isn't the city's fault. The word was out long before then.
One mitigating factor is that this was only a "precautionary" advisory; if it was more serious, where it was guaranteed a person would be made sick by drinking the water, the word would have gone out immediately, even by door-to-door or by individual phone calls to all homes, if it was needed.
It would be good for the city to figure out a better method of informing people than hoping they listen to the radio or go on-line on the Internet. Many people do not, and deserve to know as soon as possible that an advisory is in place.
The City says their number one concern is public health; therefore we need to be patient and wait for the results from the experts brought in to look at our water system - answers we all need. - Greg Nikkel
