New water treatment plant to come online in May
January 20, 2025, 8:57 am
Ryan Kiedrowski, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
Moosomin’s water treatment plant will likely come online some time in May, contingent on the arrival of a delayed control module.
“It’s supposed to be shipped early in March, so with all things working out, the middle of May we’ll be up and running,” explained Mayor Murray Gray in an update after meeting with project engineers last Thursday morning. “We’ve got all the utilities into the new plant now, as far as gas and power, and we’re just waiting on the fibre, and that fibre should be in shortly.”
The town will also see a change over to new smart water meters soon.
“We have purchased all the new water meters,” Gray confirmed. “They’re actually in town, and they’re going to start installing the new water meters in March throughout the community.”
Water meter replacement was also part of the Investing in Canada Infrastructure Program grant the town received, including swapping out the old meters for new ones.
“We have 1,100 meters to change, and they think it will only take two months, so that’s good,” Gray said. “They’re going to put them online as they put them in, so they’ll confirm that they’re communicating with the software right as they install each one of them in order to make sure that they’re not having to go back because of a communication error.”
Water softeners won’t be needed
Once the new plant comes online, water hardness will be a thing of the past, thanks to bio-filtration followed by a reverse osmosis system to treat the water.
“What basically happens is approximately 80 to 90 per cent of that water will go through the RO system,” explained Gray. “Right now, our treated water is 800 milligrams per litre of hardness, and it has to be under 300 in order for you not to use softeners. The goal is for it to be between 100 and 200 so we won’t need softeners going forward.”
With the system at Moosomin’s new water treatment plant, water coming out of the bio-filters will be good enough quality without running through the RO system, Gray says the extra process is a measure to reduce hardness.
“It would be usable already without bringing it through the RO, but the RO will bring the hardness out of it,” he said. “All of our testing we did has been excellent with removing the manganese, which is good news.”
Another huge benefit will be the ability to achieve net zero for pressure at the town lagoon.
“That was the other aspect of the cost involved in order to put a water treatment plant here: if you’re wasting one litre per litre you make, then that either has to go to an evaporation pond or into your domestic sewer, which would send it out to our lagoon,” Gray explained. “That pressure on your lagoon from all the wastewater would actually then make you have to have a bigger lagoon because of the amount of actual waste from it. So we’re actually anticipating to be at Net Zero for pressure on our lagoon, because without the water treatment, or without the water softeners running throughout the community, that regurgitation ends up in our domestic sewer.
People won’t be doing that, but we’ll have 10 per cent waste at the plant. So we actually think that the pressure on the lagoon will be zero, no more pressure than we have now.”
Project on budget
The new water treatment plant has long legs, stretching back almost 10 years when the town started planning in 2016 for replacement, leading to the ICIP funding application in 2020. Technological advancements in the world of municipal water have come a very long way in the last decade.
“I’m kind of glad that we didn’t replace it 10 years ago, because in 10 years, the technology changes that much,” said Gray. “And I’m sure 10 years from now, this one will be outdated too, they keep coming up with improvements.”
The new plant has a total cost of $13.7 million, split through a cost share that saw the federal government fund $5,492,190, then $4,576,367 from the government of Saskatchewan, leaving $3,661,918 left for the town of Moosomin.
“I tip my hat to the engineers for keeping an eye on the expenses in order to be where we’re at now,” Gray said. “There still is a possibility of something coming but to this point in time, we’re still on budget, so I’m impressed with that. Inflation is a big thing, any project that you talk about, whether it was the airport or any of the other projects, inflation has affected the bottom line, but so far, we’ve remained on budget.”
At the very least, the years spent on the new water treatment plant project have given Gray and others involved a keen learning curve.
“I’m learning lots as I go, I think it’s really fascinating,” he said.
