On May 16th, the Town of Osoyoos will be bringing Well Five online. The Town avoids using this well during the off-season as the manganese contents are higher. Unfortunately, as demand grows during the warmer months, we cannot avoid using all our well-pumping capacity to keep up with demand. This will most likely cause a surge in brown water issues around town as the well becomes operational. Please bear with us as we transition our water distribution system to summer operations.
We anticipate 3 to 4 days of “brown water” throughout the distribution system but hope to minimize the impact on our water customers by completing some aesthetic flushing as we bring this source online.
Causes of Brown Water:
-The Osoyoos Aquifer is high in natural manganese content, and we generally see three of our six production sites with manganese concentrations above the maximum acceptable concentration (MAC).
-The addition of chlorine causes manganese to become manganese oxide, which is insoluble in water; this in turn causes brown water.
-Chlorine was not added before 2018, but in order to meet the requirements of our operating permit and industry best practices, chlorine needed to be introduced, and residuals needed to be maintained.
-The manganese content in our water has not changed, but due to the addition of chlorine, it is now much more visible, and has become more of an aesthetic concern.
-Although flushing is done and can help reduce the average amounts of brown water temporarily, it causes a surge in intensity in localized incidents and must be done carefully.
-Osoyoos’ daily demand can fluctuate from roughly 2,000 m3 (roughly one Olympic sized-swimming pool) of water a day in winter to over 50,000 m3 (roughly 25 Olympic sized-swimming pools) a day in the summer. This changes the velocities and flow patterns, further stirring up sediment in the water distribution system. These large swings in demand make our distribution system much more complex to design and run.
Osoyoos Operational Services does everything possible to minimize the effects of poor water quality.