Quality
                                                                                               May 10, 2010

Water Quality Advisory Notice in Effect:

The District is currently under a Water Quality Advisory due to turbidity levels between 1 and 5 NTUs. Please follow this link to the latest News Release.

Introduction

There is no question that the safety of the public water supply in British Columbia has been under scrutiny in recent years. The tragic events of Walkerton, Ontario seriously undermined public trust in the water supply and initiated reviews of the water regulations in provincial capitals across Canada.

B.C. is no exception. Provincial authority governing water resources consists of a matrix of ministries and regulations. There is no lead agency responsible for potable water from source to tap in the province. A number of ministries and agencies with overlapping jurisdictions and mandates regulate the local water purveyor. Current legislation and provincial government policy for drinking water, although recently revised, remains piecemeal and haphazard.

In the wake of a highly critical report on source water protection by the Auditor General in 1999 and the more recent Walkerton Tragedy in May of 2000, the Minister of Environment, Lands and Parks presented the Drinking Water Protection Act (DWPA) to the legislature in the spring of 2001. The act received third reading in the legislature before the spring election, at which time the newly elected government chose to subject the act to a thorough review by an impartial panel of experts. The Drinking Water Review Panel issued an interim report in December of 2001 and a final report in February of 2002.

The DWPA was amended in late 2002 and the Drinking Water Protection Regulation (DWPR) was passed in May of 2003, bringing the act into effect. Most of the review panel recommendations were ignored, however, and many in the water supply industry feel the provincial government could have done a much better job of providing for public health and safety through the regulation of the water supply industry. The main stumbling block would appear to be money - both the cost of forming a lead agency to deal with all aspects of drinking water administration and the cost to regulate land use in multi-use crown drinking watersheds was, presumably, deemed to be prohibitively expensive.

On the positive side, however, the legislation does deal with a number of important issues and creates the new position of Drinking Water Officer (DWO). Drinking Water Officers fall under the jurisdiction of the regional health authorities that are located throughout the province. Locally this is the Interior Health Authority (IHA). The IHA has been particularly proactive in dealing with water quality and public health issues for several years. In fact, many of the requirements under the new DWPA were already standard for water suppliers operating under the jurisdiction of the IHA when the new regulations came into effect in May of 2003.