Concerns about aging water system in Guelph
Posted Sep 29, 2016 03:47:31 PM.
This article is more than 5 years old.
With the issues of Nestle renewing their water taking permit in Aberfoyle, more issues concerning water usage are surfacing in Guelph as the city loses almost 8 million litres of water a day due to its out-dated water system.
The water system in Guelph is complicated, and includes over 500 km of buried water piping.
Peter Busatto General Manager of environmental services with the City of Guelph says just like pipes in our homes, with cold winters, leaks are bound to happen.
“We’re experiencing higher leakage than we have historically with the system, the cold winters cause a lot of frozen pipes and watermain breaks.” Busatto says the city has “apprioximately 7.7 million litres a day of leakage from the system.”
He says Guelph’s water system was put in during World War II and they are constantly working to repair it.
“If you’ve got all this burried pipe you can go out and sound it with sensitive microphones and electronic recording gear and try and find these leaks proactively and fix them,” says Busatto. “In 2015 that program reduced our leakage by about 1.1 million litres per year.”
Busatto adds although the water is getting out, it’s not necessarily lost as it eventually makes its was back into the aquifer where the city draws its water from.
