Here is an latest update for everyone from Town of Oliver – Water Utility:

• ·        Our on-call water operator took three in-house water samples from Friday to Sunday and found everything to be clear but still needs to send samples to an Analytical Lab to ensure everything is okay with the water.
• ·        We finished flushing parts of Town on Friday, around 5:15pm, on both sides of the river and noticed that everything was settling down and cleaner.
• ·        No extra flushing was done over the weekend, to let everything that was stirred up from the water hammer, settle down for Monday so we can grab more accurate water samples.
• ·        We spent more than two hours (Friday afternoon) phoning; health facilities, school board, restaurants, other businesses, media (radio, TV, web & newspapers), etc… to get the word out as quickly as we could. I know we have received several angry phone calls Friday and today, that we haven’t done enough and as a group, we thought we could get some sandwich boards made up for next time and post in a few areas. We had also put a physical posting at the post office because of all the foot traffic there. For the time frame we had and the lack of time to get mail out to each property, we thought we did a decent job of getting the word out, though some people do not use the various types of media. Fortunately some people were caring and talking to others to help spread the word.
• ·        We have been in consultation, from the beginning, with Interior Health’s Environmental Health Officer for this region. We are currently deciding on how many clean samples (consecutive days) we need in order to lift the Boil Water Notice (BWN).
• ·        We have dosed more chlorine into the water system, so many people may smell it a bit more than usual. Chlorine residual is higher in the system and helps to fight bacteria, if present.
• ·        We are continuing to monitor all these things (above) and it looks like the earliest we could lift the BWN may be Thursday or Friday unfortunately.

Thank you for your patience,

Shawn Goodsell
Director of Operations
Town of Oliver