British Columbia Tries Mobile Water Treatment

Mobile water treatment plants are on the rise in British Columbia, where the method appears to be catching on in small communities.

Nickeyeah Reserve is one community giving it a try. A mobile plant installed in this community serves six homes. It requires about three hours of maintenance per week, lead water operator Jim Brown said, per The Vancouver Sun.

“It was great to work with the mobile unit, because you really don’t know what is going to work until you try it,” Brown said, per the report. “We put the water through the different processes and determined what was best for our water quality.”

The upside for the community is the relatively low cost.

“A treatment plant has been installed for less than half the cost of the $1-million estimate they received from a commercial engineering firm,” The Sun reported, citing University of British Columbia (UCB) engineering professors who developed the plant.

The lab of Madjid Mohseni, a UCB professor, “built two mobile water treatment micro-plants outfitted with a variety of filtration and purification modules, including different sized filters, an ion exchanger, activated carbon for off-taste and smell, ultraviolet (UV) purifiers and a chlorination system,” the report continued.

Locals will have a big role in operating these plants.

“Being able to participate in the testing is really important for the people who will be operating the system,” Mohseni said, per the report.

“These remote communities don’t really have expert operators, so the people who are going to run the plant can see how it works and feel comfortable with it. You have to get that buy-in from the community so they can run the plant themselves,” he said, per the report.

Various communities in British Columbia lack reliable access to clean water.

“Two-thirds of all First Nation communities in Canada have been under at least one drinking water advisory at some time in the last decade, a CBC News investigation has revealed. The numbers show that 400 out of 618 First Nations in the country had some kind of water problem between 2004 and 2014,” CBC reported.

“The longest running water advisory is in the Neskantaga First Nation in Ontario, where residents have been boiling their water for 20 years. Nazko First Nation, Alexis Creek First Nation and Lake Babine, all in British Columbia, are next on the list with water problems spanning 16 years,” the report said.