Water Levels a Concern for City of Weyburn

The City of Cape Town in South Africa is the first major city in the world to be close to running out of their water supply. It has been reported they will not be the last.

Weyburn water supply levels are on the mind of City Council and Weyburn's Mayor Marcel Roy who raised concerns in the meeting on Monday night.

"Nickel Lake has three years water supply when completely full. Last year we were at three years, we were completely full, it was filled to capacity. We're waiting for Spring run-off to bring us back up again. If we have no spring runoff we will simply have two years worth of water supply. We'll get some Spring Run-off but not to the extent that we would like," explained Roy.

Roy says if we go through the summer without the rain we need to refill Nickel Lake, the city will have to repeat what was done in previous years and restrict city water use including watering of the parks.

"Some have said back in the 80's they even simply didn't water Jubilee Park. There were three years where it was just yellow, simply being good stewards of our water."

"We are going to have to re-look at a Water Restriction Bylaw again. We've got a Bylaw Officer that's going to be moving into City Hall and that bylaw will have to be one of the bylaws they are going to enforce," said Roy and adds that there will have to be a strict enforcement of the water restrictions because he doesn't want to see Weyburn go the same way as Cape Town and have no water for residents.

There have been reports that communities north of Weyburn including farms are lacking water and looking to Weyburn for help.

Roy says we want to be good neighbours but Weyburn residents take priority over the livestock and the city is not set up to supply water for large numbers of cattle. He said in Winter, a single cow will drink a gallon of water for 100 pounds of weight and so a thousand pound cow will drink roughly 10 gallons of water a day. In the summer this can double.

The clean water reservoir is on schedule and will add 11 million litres of volume to the city water supply.

Another project the city is looking at and discussed at SUMA convention the beginning of February, was to revisit building a pipeline from Rafferty Dam to Weyburn via Midale.

"We can't be in a crisis situation when we do these things. We have to be thinking ahead, looking ahead to the future and saying, "We do not want to get into those crisis situations, let's take action before we get into these crisis situations."

Roy said a pipeline from Rafferty Dam by Estevan to Weyburn would go through Midale where a primary clean up facility would be located.