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Regina residents will have to wait at least another year before fluoride is added to their drinking water after a construction issue at the Buffalo Pound Water Treatment Plant forced engineers back to the drawing board.
“What was built was different than what was designed,” said Ryan Johnson, president and CEO of Buffalo Pound Water Treatment Corp.
“As a result, it created some redesign work for our engineers that are working on the fluoride part.”
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Johnson said the delay came after crews discovered that the area intended to house the fluoridation system had not been built as engineers originally planned during the ongoing plant renewal project.
City council had already approved fluoridation, but Johnson said Buffalo Pound had made it clear from the start that work on that system could not begin until the general contractor was off site.
“We basically indicated that we wouldn’t even be able to do any of that work until after the general contractor was off site,” Johnson said.
“When we have two general contractors on site. There’s generally always a conflict, which just becomes problematic for all parties.”
The fluoridation equipment was supposed to be installed in the plant’s chemical building, where treatment chemicals such as chlorine are already stored. Johnson said Buffalo Pound had completed the design work in anticipation of moving ahead once the space was available.
But once the contractor turned over the area, staff found a problem.
“It was discovered that what the general contractor built was different than what was designed,” Johnson said.
Rather than get tied up in a long dispute over who was responsible, Johnson said Buffalo Pound decided it would be faster to redesign the fluoridation work now and sort out accountability later.
“At this stage, it was easier for us to just do a redesign, because it’d be faster,” he said.
“Otherwise what happens is, in a dispute like this the general contractor will explain their situation, we’ll explain ours, and then it’d take a year to solve it, and it would just take forever to get the fluoride project done.”
Johnson said the redesign was nearly complete and the next step would be to issue a fresh tender for construction within the next couple of months.
He said Buffalo Pound expected the contract to be awarded by the third quarter of this year. After that, the successful bidder would have to order specialized equipment, some of which still needs to be manufactured.
Because of those procurement and installation timelines, Johnson said the fluoridation system likely won’t be installed, completed and operational until summer 2027.
The broader plant renewal project was originally tendered to Aecon and Graham Construction in a joint venture.
Johnson said Buffalo Pound was still investigating exactly how the issue was missed. He said the corporation had hired an owner’s advocate to help oversee the project and would be looking into what happened.
“We’re still looking into the whole details of why this happened,” Johnson said. “That should have been identified, that there was a problem.”
He added there were deficiency holdbacks in place for work that did not meet contract standards, though Buffalo Pound was still determining how that part of the file would be handled.
“We’ll fight out the other issue later,” Johnson said.
CJME News has reached out to Aecon and Graham Construction for comment.
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