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Saskatoon Emergency Management issued an alert Christmas Eve asking residents to only use water for essential purposes.
The restrictions are expected to end sometime Thursday evening, Saskatoon Water Director Russ Munro said in an update.
“We’re expecting probably in the next five or so hours to have things turned around to the point where we’re producing enough water that we’re making up for the water we’re losing from the reservoirs,” Munro said. “It will be a little bit longer before we’re back up to full capacity.”
The restrictions were put in place due to unusually high sand loads from the river creating issues at the plant, according to Munro.
“A high amount of sand entered our intake. That large volume of sanding was pumped then into the plant, displacing some of the what we would call the the bed of the clarifier,” he said. “As a result of our clarifiers being less effective, that puts more work on the water treatment plants filters so they have to do more work to remove material to maintain our current quality.
“It reduces their capacity just like a furnace filter in your house, if it starts to fill up, it doesn’t pump as much air as efficiently.”
Essential water use includes things such as cooking, brushing your teeth or having a short shower.
Munro says to avoid doing excessive laundry or anything else that requires using a large amount of water such as washing your vehicle.
“It’s a matter of going through and systematically washing all of the filters in the water treatment plant, that’s where residents come in,” he said. “As you reduce the demand, that allows more water to be left over for the water treatment plant to use in cleaning its own filters, we use our own filtered water to backwash them. Having greater volume there, allows us to wash those filters faster.
“If everyone can do their part and reduce their their water use right now, that helps us to get those filters washed faster and get things turned around.”
Munro added that the water is still safe to drink at this time.
He did not know why the large amount of sand ended up overwhelming the system.
