| |
The Municipality of West Elgin has gained a significant new business resource --
one of the most modern water treatment plants in Ontario.
The West Elgin Water Treatment Plant officially opened August 26, 2009 at the conclusion
of a six-year, $21.8-million project to expand and upgrade the water supply to West
Elgin and several neighbouring municipalities.
Warden
Graham Warwick, Mayor of the Municipality of West Elgin and Chair of the Tri-County
Water Management Committee, said at the opening ceremony that the new plant “will
ensure a secure supply of the highest-quality water for generations to come, benefiting
the economy, the environment, and the quality of life for the families of the Tri-County
area.”
Located just south of the hamlet of Eagle, the treatment plant serves the municipalities
of West Elgin, Dutton-Dunwich, Southwest Middlesex, Newbury and the community of
Bothwell in Chatham-Kent.
It is close to the original plant built in 1939.
"The new plant has almost double the capacity of the old one," says Andy Valickis,
who directed the construction project for the Ontario Clean Water Agency, a provincial
Crown agency that also operates and maintains the plant.
“Now we can serve more people, so the future growth in the area is not constrained
by an inability to treat water,” Valickis says. “For developers building subdivisions
and for industry coming in, there is more than enough water treatment capacity in
West Elgin.
“And the plant produces the highest quality of drinking water you can get anywhere.”
One reason for the high quality is that the West Elgin plant treats the water drawn
from Lake Erie with an advanced oxidation process using ultra-violet light combined
with peroxide, which both disinfects the water and improves its taste. Only a few
water treatment plants in Ontario have this advanced process.
Particles and organisms in the water are filtered by membranes instead of being
removed by chemicals. This state-of-the-art process has an additional advantage
in that the water containing the particles is backwashed into a retention pond,
augmenting a nearby wetland. The Municipality of West Elgin joined with
local community
environmental groups to construct the wetland retention pond, which people can enjoy
by means of a public walkway.
The West Elgin Water Treatment Plant was made possible by the cooperation of all
three levels of government. The Municipality of West Elgin received 90 per cent
of the funding through the Canada-Ontario Municipal Rural Infrastructure Fund, a
partnership between the Government of Canada and the Government of Ontario to improve and renew public infrastructure.
|
|
 |
|
