In mid-July, the Town of Niverville experienced a brief interruption to its water services.
On Wednesday, July 18, the town issued a request for residents to restrict their water usage—notably, to avoid watering their lawns. This followed a long lawn-watering ban in the spring, not to mention frequent similar requests from town council in previous years.
Water shortages such as these seemed to have been solved for good when Niverville hooked up to a new water source at the beginning of June.
Mayor Myron Dyck characterized the incident as a hiccup in the new system, one which was solved after a weekend of troubleshooting. Full service was restored on Monday, July 23.
The problem resulted from iron sediment building up in the water line, which Dyck says is a problem encountered by many other nearby communities after sudden increases in consumption, such as Niverville has experienced due to recent dry conditions. When water usage increases dramatically, iron sediment in the line can be flushed down the pipes and clog the treatment plant.
Dyck seeks to reassure residents that the town’s maintenance protocols have been updated to avoid this kind of issue in the future.
“For lack of a better way of saying it, [we use] a big foam earplug,” Dyck says of the process to clean the water line. “This line is 14 inches in diameter and the plug is roughly two feet long. It has a big hard cap on either end and foam in the middle, and through water pressure they force this thing along the line and it essentially cleans the inside of the pipe.”
The cost of one of these plugs is a mere $80, and the people who complete the work are, for the most part, already on salary for the town. Thus, the cost of adding this process to the regular maintenance schedule, Dyck says, is negligible.
