BARRHEAD -Residents in Manola have water once again.
County of Barrhead infrastructure director Ken Hove told councillors during the Jan. 16 meeting that residents in the hamlet would have water later that afternoon after several days without it.
Hove said on the evening of Jan. 13, the utility officer received a warning alert via the SCADA system from the Manola pumphouse from SCADA on his cellphone, saying the water in the reservoir was low and that the temperature in the building was 1 C.
SCADA is an electronic system that allows public works staff to monitor the quality of the drinking water in Manola, Neerlandia and Northplex and control several functions of the water system remotely.
When Wierenga and Hove arrived at the pumphouse, they found it frozen.
After getting the building "thawed out" and stopping "the water from blowing against the ceiling", they believed they had solved the problem.
However, Hove said by the time they had returned to Barrhead, the utility officer had received another alert from the SCADA system saying that the water reservoir level was low.
"[It also told us] that we had a large leak out there spilling out at seven litres a second, which is more than the system ever uses," he said.
Hove added that the utility officer returned to the Manola pumphouse the next day, this time with public works manager Travis Wierenga to determine where the leak was.
"There weren't enough valves in place to shut the leak off, so they had to turn off the water to the entire hamlet," he said.
Hove noted that public works staff went door-to-door, informing Hamlet residents about the leak, and arranged for water to be delivered to the residents.
He noted that the unusually frigid temperature, which at times was below -40 C, posed a challenge for public works staff, saying it took about half the day on Jan. 15 to mobilize all the necessary equipment.
"We couldn't get a truck going to unload the excavator, so we ended up using our sanding unit that was in the shop, taking the sanding unit and plow off it so we could hook a trailer to it to get our equipment off," Hove said.
Eventually, by about noon, he said, they had found the leak, a four-inch line leaving the hamlet to the north that wasn't marked on the county's maps.
"The end had blown off of it, and it was going full-flow," Hove said, adding to find the leak, they had to turn the water to the hamlet back on temporarily.
He added that despite how frozen the ground was, water still made it to the surface.
Making things more difficult, he said, was the broken pipe was in the middle of a road, "the most frozen part, which made digging more difficult."
Hove said staff went to Edmonton for the necessary parts and that they would be installing the new cap that afternoon (Jan. 16).
Coun. Walter Preugschas asked what the purpose of a dead-end line would be.
Hove did not know but speculated that when the Barrhead Regional Water Commission had the trench open and installed the main waterline to Manola, they would install an offshoot going to the north for future expansion.
Deputy Reeve Marvin Schatz asked Hove if the temperatures could have caused the cap at the end of the line to come off.
"We don't know," he replied. "When we were thawing out the pumphouse the gauge showed 90 pounds at times, so we thought we might have had a spike in outlet water and by having three pumps turned on at once, maybe that pressure popped the cap off. But we are just speculating."
