Regina conserving water after power loss at treatment plant

The City of Regina is asking people to conserve water after the Buffalo Pound Water Treatment Plant lost power again Wednesday morning.

While power was restored following Tuesday’s major outage, the plant had been experiencing intermittent outages since Saturday due to frost on the single power line that supplies the plant. That was followed by this latest outage on Wednesday.

In the meantime, the power outage has caused the city to rely on its reservoirs and wells.

“We are asking residents to conserve water by limiting unnecessary usage such as doing laundry at this time,” said Pat Wilson, Director Water, Waste and Environmental Services.

Between wells and reservoirs, Wilson said the city has more than enough clean and safe water to slast during the outage.

Tap water may appear cloudy as the well water makes its way through the system, but Wilson assured it is clean and safe to drink.

The water treatment plant general manager Ryan Johnson said they’ve been able to keep city reservoirs topped up.

“We’re still enacting an emergency plan to bring in generators just to ensure that we do have the ability to supply water if it becomes a long-term thing.”

Power is expected to be restored sometime Wednesday afternoon, but Johnson explained the plant can run indefinitely on generators, just not at 100 per cent.