City of Yellowknife staff will set out plans for years of water supply upgrade work at an open house on Thursday, April 16. Their message: “More water is needed.”
The proposed project involves a new pumphouse to replace an ageing one and upgrades to a second pumphouse.
The city is also asking regulators to double the amount of water it can draw each year so the municipality “can meet current demand while planning for future growth” – and to alter the rules under which it draws water from Yellowknife Bay.
An application like this comes as the military is planning to pour billions of dollars into the local economy. Yellowknife’s population has risen only slightly in two decades – 19,642 in 2005, 22,858 last year – but officials are now planning for that rate to increase.
Meanwhile, the cost of major infrastructure work is going up, too.
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The city had originally planned to replace the pipe that carries water from the Yellowknife River to its water treatment plant, but that project may now be too costly to carry out, even with about $26 million in federal funding available.
While the future of the pipe replacement isn’t fully certain – it could still happen at some point – the city is repurposing the $26 million and spending it on a replacement for pumphouse one, a key facility that is old and in danger of failing.
Pumphouse two also needs some more moderate upgrade work.
Pumphouse one is “even more important than the water treatment plant, frankly, because it gets water out of the lake to the treatment plant,” city public works director Chris Greencorn told Cabin Radio on Friday.
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“The oldest part of it is from 1948 and there’s multiple problems with it. You can imagine anything from the 40s, 50s, 60s needs to be upgraded,” Greencorn said.
“We’re going to be increasing pumping capacity. We’re going to be modernizing the building. The controls, the mechanical systems, how we temper the water will all be modernized. It’s heart replacement surgery, so to speak, for our water system.”
The final cost of the work is likely to exceed $26 million but hasn’t yet been finalized. The city must first go through initial regulatory processes, including the application to double its annual water draw from four million to eight million cubic metres.
“That provides us some leniency for future growth, some of these DND investments that are coming, and just provides us a bit of cushion in terms of water draw,” said Greencorn.
The municipality is also asking for water licence terms that make it slightly more straightforward to draw water directly from Yellowknife Bay.
Traditionally, the city has avoided doing so because of the slim but non-zero chance that Giant Mine, the nearby toxic former gold mine site, contaminates the bay water beyond limits set out in safe water guidelines. However, drawing from the bay can bring in more water, faster, than drawing from the river upstream.
The city wants residents to attend Thursday’s open house – from 6pm to 8pm at the Explorer Hotel – to “ask questions, fill out a comment form, and share knowledge related to Yellowknife Bay and the Yellowknife River.”
If the pumphouse work goes ahead, it’s not likely to start until at least 2028 and is expected to take several years.
“This is absolutely necessary work that the city has to get done,” said Greencorn.
“It’s great news that we got funding for it, that it’s not all on residential property tax dollars, and we’re going to get these necessary upgrades done for both existing and future development. We’re future-proofing these facilities as much as possible.”
