Tantramar Town Engineer Jon Eppell says a new $55,000 pump was successfully installed last week at the Sackville water treatment plant in the Ogden loop area off Walker Road.

The pump was lowered into the plant through a specially designed hatch on the building’s metal roof.

“The pump is now operational. It is producing much higher flows,” Eppell said in an e-mail to Warktimes.

Town council authorized the purchase of the new pump last September after Eppell warned that Sackville faced a risk of a water shortage because the impellers or blades in three pumps were too worn to perform properly.

He said the pumps were installed around 1997 and did not appear to have been refurbished or serviced since then.

Last Thursday, a crane removed the old pump before lowering the new one into the plant.

The old pump will now be refurbished replacing the second of the three pumps, which will then be refurbished until Sackville is left with one new pump and three refurbished ones, an operation that will cost just over $100,000.

During a step-by-step, media tour of the water plant last week, Eppell explained how it works.

He said that water from three deep wells gets pumped into a big tank underneath the treatment plant.

The three pumps, that are being replaced or refurbished, lift the water from the raw-water tank and pump it through two big, blue-painted filters that contain anthracite or charcoal-like material and sand.

“The water then gets deposited into a large tank that’s underneath the building and actually extends beyond the building,” Eppell said, “and we add chlorine, we add some pH adjustment, erosion protection and then by gravity, it goes to town.”

He says fluoride is not added to Sackville’s water.

Ron Nicholson, project manager for Veolia, the multi-national company that has operated and maintained Sackville’s water plant since 2007, explained that since chlorine gas is acidic, caustic soda is needed to make the water more palatable.

“It’s better on your skin for showering, bathing, things like that,” he said. “I’ll tell you that once it went in, the complaints from the town went way down.”

The Sackville plant treats about 2,500 cubic metres of water per day, enough to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool.

Since 1998, Veolia has operated Moncton’s much-larger water treatment plant with a capacity of 45,000 cubic metres per day.

Moncton’s water comes from a surface reservoir, but Sackville now relies on three, deep wells with its two surface reservoirs as backup.

“The advantage of using wells is that there’s some natural filtering that happens, and you’re less susceptible to surface runoff and feces from animals and air pollution and that sort of thing,” Eppell says.

Ron Nicholson explained that when the filters inside the water plant get plugged with iron, manganese and other particles, Veolia runs a backwash or flushing cycle at least once every day.

“What happens there is this silver air blower pushes air up through the media, the sand and all that, it breaks it up, lifts it up,” he says, “and then these larger pumps come on, they come up underneath and push the water out.”

He explained the backwash water is discharged to two, fenced-in lagoons that act as settling ponds which get cleaned out periodically.

Sackville’s water treatment plant also houses a small lab where water samples are regularly tested to ensure that water quality meets Canadian drinking water guidelines.

Nicholson says Veolia staff are at the water treatment plant at least twice a week, but monitor it through a remote automatic messaging system that notifies operators if things go wrong.

“It’s a constant alarms system, so anything goes out of whack, drifts a certain way, they get notified,” he says.

“It’s really monitored 24-7.”

For CHMA reporter Erica Butler’s coverage of the water plant tour, click here.