To the Editor: The City of Weyburn's poor planning causes many complications.
To the Editor:
The City of Weyburn's poor planning causes many complications.
So while at city council meeting last Monday for an unrelated topic, such as "Why are you putting a 60-foot building in my back yard", I had the amazing experience to listen to what my dad would have called a "Sheister", someone who speaks out both sides of his mouth, hoping to confuse.
Some Peter guy from some engineering company who was asked by our Mayor to come to the front to speak on the situation with our water problems, vaguely and almost without conscience sat and told us that there may be issues with our water and that there would be need for some infrastructure changes in the plant in the future.
When asked directly by Greg Nikkel "is our water safe to consume", it was again met with an ambiguous answer of something to the effect that it was okay, but we don't have all the answers yet from the environment office.
So now I am sitting there all flustered, not even remembering to think about what I am here to address, but more to: "What the hell was that?" "What just happened?" He never answered a single question posed by Mr. Nikkel or Ms. LaCharite. (Please watch city council for March 12, 2012 on the Access local channel.)
Then I hear that our council "has never been or wanted to be so transparent".
Transparent [-pair-uhnt]
Def: 1 - able to be seen clearly through,
2: - easily understood, obvious
One thing for sure, it was quite obvious that it was NOT obvious, nor was it clear.
Here's the facts:
Cryptosporidiosis is an acute, yet self-limiting diarrheal illness (one to two week duration), and symptoms include: frequent, watery diarrhea, nausea, vomiting, abdominal cramps, and low-grade fever.
Transmission is usually fecal-oral, (yes, the POOP you are drinking if you are not boiling your water) often through water contaminated by livestock mammal feces.
Cryptosporidial infection can thus be transmitted from fecal-contaminated food and water, from animal-person contact, and via person-person contact.
Where is the poop coming from? Are cows pooping in our drinking water, are we ourselves, or do we have a deficient cleaning system in place?
Cryptosporidium has a spore phase (oocyst) and in this state it can survive for lengthy periods outside a host. It can also resist many common disinfectants, notably chlorine-based disinfectants.
If one does not want to boil water constantly, a household water filtration system or drinking bottled water can reduce the risk of Cryptosporidium infection. When selecting a filtration system, the system should have one or all of the following characteristics:
It can remove particles that are 0.1-1 micrometers in size; filters water by reverse osmosis; it has an "absolute" 1-micron filter; meets NSF standard no. 53 for "cyst removal".
Municipal water utilities provide relatively good protection against water-borne Cryptosporidium infection. There were only six major documented cases of cryptosporidiosis outbreaks via drinking water between 1984-1994 in the United States, even though the 1993 outbreak in Milwaukee caused over 400,000 cases (Jakubowski, 1995).
Since this massive outbreak, much more research has been done to eliminate the possibility of further outbreaks via public drinking water. That's 17 years ago. Has our water system been planned for expansion so as to increase volumes as our city inevitably grows?
Municipal drinking water is purified two ways: through chemical treatments and through filtration. Chemically, chlorination is used most frequently to safely disinfect drinking water by killing most viruses, bacteria, and protozoa like Giardia, but studies have shown that Cryptosporidium is 240,000 times more resistant to chlorination than Giardia.
Filtration is a better bet for removing C. parvum oocysts from municipal drinking water. In recent years, ultra-fine membranes have been developed to remove various contaminants from drinking water.
Does our city filtration plant not have this?
No safe and effective therapy for cryptosporidial enteritis has been successfully developed.
So in closing, instead of researching what is necessary for safe water, we leave it to some engineer guy who can't answer a straight question.
Suggestion to council: FIRE HIM NOW and get someone in who knows their stuff.
If there is an issue with our water and it is related to infrastructure, then maybe we should have looked at that previously. Improper planning I figure. We've had 17 years since the last major outbreak.
If there was a problem with the way the question was posed to the public about a new hospital and that 209 people who asked a question were ignored and a vote was held, I figure there should have been better planning and clarity on the question.
If someone is putting a 60-foot tall building 10 feet from your property line, then maybe, just maybe, there should be a little more planning if the residents who live there don't like it. Maybe someone should have done some better planning?
If you are going to try and entice people to move to your city you should have more than $100,000 to $150,000 lots available. Apparently this city never planned on expansion?
See the common theme here?
I do commend councilor Broccolo on his comment about letting the citizens decide after the fact whether they did the right thing by voting on the levy for the new hospital "NOW", as apparently if we don't get the water infrastructure fixed soon, we may all need it sooner than we think.
For being our elected representatives looking out for our best interests and being of 'intellect', I can't see how you can let a "sheister" engineer talk to you that way and allow poop into our water, levy a tax without proper consultation and buildstructures around people's houses who are opposed to it.
Your poor planning is causing a pain where my cryptosporidium resides.
Ron Knox
Weyburn
