By James Peters

City aware of potential problem before total water plant shutdown

Mar 9, 2017 | 10:35 AM

KAMLOOPS — The City of Kamloops says it knew programming issues could present problems at the Centre for Water Quality even before Wednesday’s programming-related shutdown.

A blown transformer at 4:00 a.m. Wednesday took out the treatment plant’s programming matrix.

Public Works and Utilities Director Jen Fretz says the event essentially crippled the plant.

“The automation for the filtration component was what went down and we don’t have a manual ability to work that component, so the treatment plant was basically rendered useless,” said Fretz.

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“We even thought about, can we flow water through the treatment plant, not treat it, and put it into the distribution system if we had to, but that wasn’t even possible.”

Fretz says her department is now investigating what happened, and how it can be prevented from happening again.

“We are looking at what took out the transformer from a power supply perspective. We are also looking at why are programming went so crazy as a result of that,” said Fretz.

“We’re also trying to figure out why was the programming not able to be started from scratch, or have some backup that was allowing us to start it.”

While the water distribution system is built with several backups and redundancies, that’s not the case with this particular component of the treatment plant.

“(Why there is no backup is) a very, very valid question and we have the same question internally as well. I want people to understand that we didn’t have an issue with no power. We do have two transformers there so we always had power to the station. The problem was we couldn’t operate the treatment plant.”

Fretz says this situation had already been identified as a possibility by city staff.

“We knew even before yesterday that programming was one of the things that we would potentially have issues with at the plant,” said Fretz.

“For whatever reason, the decision was made when the plant was first put into operation to have it be a stand-alone, like an island unto itself. We have found that that is not the most effective way for it to operate. So we have already begun trying to make some changes there. It’s going to be a couple of years before we are able to be fully changed over essentially, but that has already begun as well.”