ATHABASCA - “Shocking” and “incredible”, were a couple of the superlatives used at Athabasca town council’s Nov. 1 meeting, referring to the summer waterline break under Highway 55 that resulted in the discovery of a line that was never completed.
Athabasca mayor Rob Balay told council he attended a water commission meeting earlier that day and got an update on the surprise project from July, the costs of which are now being realized.
“We had a water commission meeting today and I was very happy to see that our water usage dropped significantly, so we have a pretty good idea of how much water we were losing,” Balay said. “We ended up probably spending a lot of money … It was quite shocking.”
Utilities supervisor Terry Kosinski added, “I’ve seen those numbers and I agree, it’s incredible.”
This summer, just as crews were preparing to start the Highway 55 overlay project, a leak in the line that provides downtown Athabasca with treated water from the water treatment plant, was detected, but getting to the bottom of the problem took longer than expected, said Balay in a follow-up interview.
“The reason we ended up losing such a significant amount of water, was it was very difficult to locate the leak. And then once we started digging into the history of the project and finding out we were still existing on the old line, and the new line had never been totally completed,” said Balay. “By the time we got that figured out and then coordinated for someone to come in and do it, we were losing water for a significant period of time.”
Balay said there may have been a small break in the pipe for some time, but there was likely about three weeks where the leak went undiscovered. He said they started noticing there was trouble filling up the Rupert reservoir and went in to investigate and found the leak right under the junction of the two highways.
While it usually only takes a day or two to fix a common line break, town crews took a little longer with this one due to the location, and during the break the town had to hire trucks to haul water to the reservoir to keep water supplies reliable.
Balay was hesitant to give a number but estimated very roughly that the costs of the entire project, including labour and manhours, and the hiring of the trucks could add up to close to $50,000, he said.
“I don’t want to stick my neck out too far, but I expect this to be in excess of $50,000.”
