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Community Profile - Brooks

Construction will soon be underway for a new water treatment plant designed to serve not only Brooks, but the entire county.

The recently-formed Newell Regional Services Corporation will run the plant, which will provide fresh, clean water to Brooks, Rosemary, Tilley, Duchess, Bassano and the County of Newell. Crews are already installing raw water lines from the region’s source,

Lake Newell, to the new plant, which is being built around Brooks’ existing water treatment facility on Canal Street. The entire project is expected to be done by 2010.

The new water treatment scheme is another mark of progress for Brooks, which passed a bylaw in 2006 mandating low-flow plumbing fixtures in all new buildings.

Source: City of Brooks

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Community Profile - Grande Prairie

The City of Grande Prairie gets its drinking water from Aquatera, the province’s first regional utility corporation.

Aquatera’s plant outside of the city is designed to treat an average of 18 million litres of water a day for the city of Grande Prairie, several surrounding communities and some areas in the County of Grande Prairie.

The area’s drinking water comes from the Wapiti River, and is first pumped into storage ponds across from the plant.

From the ponds, raw water is pumped into the plant. Inside, the water first undergoes a “flash” mixing with chemicals that will promote coagulation — a process that makes small particles form into larger ones. A more gentle mixing allows the larger particles to begin forming.

When the water is moved into tanks, the larger particles then form a sludge that settles at the bottom and is removed and sent to Aquatera’s wastewater treatment plant.

Free of sludge, the clarified water is disinfected with chlorine and then passed through filters that remove particles too small to catch during the settling process.

The water is then piped into a 9 million litre reservoir, where it is ready to be pumped to the community and consumed.

Aquatera also adds fluoride to its drinking water, a commonly-used practice designed to prevent tooth decay.

All along the way, the treatment processes are automatically controlled by instruments programmed by human operators. The operators can also manually control the instruments if necessary.

Aquatera continuously collects samples from its treatment plant and tests the water. Every month, Aquatera sends samples to Alberta Environment for further testing, and to confirm the results obtained at the plant.

Source: Aquatera Utilities Inc.

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Community Profile - Lethbridge

Every day, Lethbridge’s water treatment plant converts raw water from the Oldman River into an average of 50 million litres of high-quality drinking water for the city’s residents.

To make sure the water is fit for human consumption, it goes through several steps. First, approved chemicals change tiny particles into larger ones that are big enough to see — a process called coagulation.

Then comes a step known as sedimentation: the water moves into tanks called clarifiers, where most of the larger particles can be removed from the water as they settle.

After that, the remaining particles — which can be as small as a fraction of a millimetre and too small to see with the naked eye — are filtered from the settled water.

Like many municipalities, Lethbridge adds fluoride ions to the water to promote dental health. Lethbridge has been fluoridating the municipal water supply since 1972.

The water is ready to drink once it’s disinfected using a combination of chlorine and ultraviolet light to destroy disease-causing organisms that weren’t removed through the previous processes.

The chlorine is then combined with ammonia to form chloramine. This final step ensures the chlorine continues to protect the water as it makes its way to residents’ taps by reducing the formation of chlorine byproducts along the way.

All these safeguards combine to produce a drinking water supply that consistently exceeds standards established by Health Canada in its “Guidelines for Canadian Drinking Water Quality,” and it also surpasses provincial requirements set out in Alberta’s Environmental Protection and Enhancement Act.

Source: City of Lethbridge

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Community Profile - Red Deer As the Red Deer River flows down from the Rocky Mountains, it supplies drinking water to the City of Red Deer and many other communities along the way.

Red Deer’s water treatment plant, which was built in the 1950s and underwent an upgrade completed in 1983, uses several steps to turn raw river water into a safe drinking supply for the population.

When raw water enters the system, it first passes through a rough screen that removes large debris such as sticks, branches and weeds. As water is pumped toward the treatment plant, chemicals such as potassium permanganate and powder activated carbon can be added to control its taste and odour. Another chemical additive promotes coagulation, a process that makes tiny particles form into larger ones called floccules.

The City of Red Deer uses a patented process called “ballasted flocculation,” which injects fine sand coated with polymers into the coagulated water. Adding the sand to the coagulated water increases the density of the floccules, making them easier to remove during the next step: sedimentation.

When the floccules are heavy enough to settle at the bottom of a holding tank, the resulting sludge is separated from the water. The sludge undergoes a process that allows the plant to recover and re-use the sand.

The water, meanwhile, passes through filters made of fine quartz sand and anthracite coal to remove fine particles. After that, the water is disinfected using chlorine and ultraviolet light. Chlorine kills most water-borne pathogens, and UV light is able to sterilize others that are more resistant to chlorine.

Like many municipalities, Red Deer adds fluoride to its water supply to help prevent tooth decay.

Before the water is finished treatment, ammonia is combined with the chlorine. The resulting compound — chloramine — keeps the water disinfected as it travels to homes and businesses.

Another final measure, the addition of caustic soda, ensures the water doesn’t form scales. Red Deer’s treated water meets and exceeds all of the standards contained in Health Canada’s “Guidelines for Canadian Drinking Water Quality.”

Source: City of Red Deer

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