Winnipeg's Water Catastrophe - Part 1

I'm going to take a break from the tongue-in-cheek stories for a while. For the next few weeks I'm going to publish a series of stories on the City of Winnipeg's major water problem. I'm going to try to get to the bottom of the water quality problem the City has been having - a problem which the vast majority of Winnipeggers are unaware.

I always wondered about the lack of proper water treatment for the City of Winnipeg. All the City has ever done to "clean" the water is to dose it with chlorine. When I heard that the levels of chlorine they were using could cause serious medical problems, I decided it was time to do something about my concerns. About a year ago, I installed a couple of filters in my house. The first one was at my kitchen sink. This filter removes chlorine, odours, rust, sediment, and parasites such as cryptosporidium and giardia. This water we would use for drinking, making ice cubes - anything where the water wasn't boiled before being consumed. The second filter is a whole-house filter. It is installed right after the water meter (on the house side). This filter removes chlorine, rust and sediment.

I was happy to have the chlorine removed from our supply of water. Especially with the whole-house filter. One of the big problems with chlorine in the water is breathing it in while taking a shower. As the water is sprayed into the shower, chlorine molecules become airborne and are inhaled into our lungs. Chlorine molecules are a known carcinogen. The only remaining problems with the water quality would involve ingesting water from washing vegetables or while brushing our teeth. These seemed to be acceptable risks since boiling water for these uses seemed a little extreme to say the least.

My family noticed an immediate difference in our day-to-day health. The bouts of stomach troubles that we would get, mysteriously at the same time as each other, really seemed to have eased off. Until the end of October of this year.

Suddenly everybody was sick and couldn't get over it. Coincidentally at the same time the whole-house water filter plugged up and there was barely enough water pressure to have a shower. The filter had only been on for 2 months. The normal length of time for the filter to last is 3 months and I've noticed negligible loss in water pressure even up to 4 months. So 2 months was certainly early for the filter to plug up but I thought perhaps the water had been a little more turbid than usual. My associate at work suggested the Fall turnover of the water in the City reservoirs - a process not unlike a temperature inversion in the atmosphere. This seemed to make sense. It was the right time of year and this would certainly cause a little turbulence in the water supply. So I replaced the filter. ONE WEEK LATER it was plugged again.

I took a closer look at the filter this time and found that it was full of sludge! After ONE WEEK. I called the City Lab in charge of testing for Winnipeg's water quality and found out that indeed the City's water was very turbid right now due to the fact that they had run one of the City reservoirs right down to make repairs to it. No bacteria or parasites had been found in the water, however. I questioned the Lab employee about the recent addition of phosphoric acid to our water supply. (We had been told in the Winnipeg Free Press that this would coat the lead pipes, prevent further deterioration of these pipes and that there was more phosphoric acid in a bottle of coke.) The Lab employee told me that as I suspected the phosphoric acid has been "cleaning out" our water lines throughout the City. He said not to worry - just boil our water if we have any immuno-suppressed people in our household.

Wow! This was the standard response from the City of Winnipeg to people who showed any concern about the quality of our water supply. Do they realize what an inane idea that is? Boil your water before you brush your teeth? Boil your water before you wash some lettuce? This solution is completely off the wall and totally unrealistic. And then guess what? Two days after I talked to this fellow, The Winnipeg Free Press announced that cryptosporidium had been found in our water supply and the City had no idea how it got there. I'll give them a clue. Cryptosporidium comes from runoff from land that has infected animal feces on it. The Free Press article went on to say not to worry, only immuno-compromised people will die and that these people should boil their water. Healthy people won't die. But they don't explain that healthy people will just get ill. I don't know about you but being ill from a gut-invading parasite isn't my idea of a trip to the beach.

So now we have something in the water that's clogging my filters (and let me point out that I live in a new area of Winnipeg completely serviced with plastic watermains and copper lines from the street to the house) and we have cryptosporidium present in the reservoirs. Now I can't even protect myself from the cryptosporidium by filtering the water.

I tried flushing my filter and that seemed to clean it out enough to give us a decent flow of water. The showers were still a little brutal but I thought that if there was any time to be filtering the water, now was it. Within a couple of weeks the filter had clogged beyond the point of being able to clean it out, so I bought another one and installed it late last Wednesday night. Hopefully, the turbidity had eased off and this filter would last for a while. Early Sunday morning, when my daughter tried to have a shower, I quickly learned that there was once again very little water pressure. I checked the filter and found it to be full of sludge. After 3 days of use. Now what do I do?

First of all, I've collected most of the sludge off of this 3-day old filter and this week I'll attempt to find a non-partisan lab to have it analyzed. I took a picture of the sludge in the filter and you can view it on the Picture of the Week page. If anybody has any connections or names of people that I could contact to get something done about this problem please let me know. Barring this, I'm going to phone my councillor and the Water Department this week also.

I read a recent report from a Federal Health official that stated that all Winnipeggers should boil their water year round, even though our Provincial Health official tells us not to worry. Does she not remember Walkerton? And, the City just voted 15-1 to build a water treatment plant by 2006. This isn't being done because the City councillors are kind people - they are scared. They remember. And the only reason I took notice of this was because of a clogged filter.

To be continued...

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© December 2, 2000