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OTTAWA — Water consumption of Ottawa residents is going down as environmental awareness and rising utility bills have their effect, say city officials.
Touring an expansion of the city’s Lemieux Island water-treatment plant Friday, city managers said household use of water has dropped between 20 and 30 per cent in the last five years.
“We’re seeing a steady decline,” said Dixon Weir, general manager of environmental services at the city. “People are changing their habits.”
Weir said a variety of factors are causing the demand for water to level out and actually decline. These include the efficient new plumbing fixtures used for new homes and renovations, gardeners deciding to stop extensive watering of lawns and the near elimination of things like washing driveways.
Weir said the city’s utility bills have also been playing a key role. The city has been increasing the water rate by nine per cent a year to pay for replacement and expansion of old water and sewer operations.
Tammy Rose, manager of drinking water operations, said five years ago the city was consuming 350 million litres of water a day but by last year that was down to 300 million litres, in spite of residential and business growth. Rose said the downtown areas of Ottawa have seen consumption drop, while the suburban areas have seen consumption levels remain steady despite major population growth.
Another factor helping in water conservation is that the city is working to stop a huge amount of leakage from its water-distribution system.
Weir and his staff were taking Deputy Mayor Diane Deans on a short tour of the water-treatment plant at Lemieux Island to mark Drinking Water Week.
A $47-million expansion project involving the water-filtration system, and installation of big new pipes to the nearby Fleet Street Pumping Station, are underway. The Lemieux Island plant has seen more than $150 million spent in the last five years.
The Lemieux plant will go from a potential daily production of 290 million litres to 400 million with the expansion, which is to be complete by the spring of 2010.
Weir said that with the expanded plant at Lemieux, there should be no need to ask residents to lower water consumption in the event that the city’s other water plant, Britannia, is not operating for some reason. Such requests of the public have happened only a couple of times in recent years.
Weir said that it’s important that the city have substantial capacity to treat and distribute treated drinking water because its quality can deteriorate if it is stored. And he said the city needs the ability to produce and distribute a lot of water quickly due to the jumps in demand in the morning and at night.
During the Lemieux event, Weir noted with pride that the city’s water was recently found to be free of any traces of pharmaceutical drugs, one of the recent concerns of public health advocates.
Weir noted that one of the big advantages the city has is that the water supply taken is from a massive geographic area, the Ottawa River Basin, which improves quality.
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