Delivery method at fault for bad water
RESERVE: Not always treatment plant, study shows
Nora Whiteway moved up in the world. A water tank was installed at her house on a remote Manitoba First Nations reserve last year, meaning she no longer had to fetch water from community taps.
But she has seen little evidence the tanks — filled by truck every two weeks — are ever cleaned, while many in the community break out in boils they suspect are related to water quality.
“We have no choice but to drink it,” Whiteway said Sunday from Wasagamack. “But I don’t trust it.”
A newly published study of a reserve in the same Island Lake area suggests she and many others have reason to be worried.
It found “alarmingly high” levels of fecal bacteria in the community’s water system, “far below” the standard expected of a developed country. But unlike scores of other First Nations communities across Canada, the reserve treatment plant worked fine, producing clean, pathogen-free water.
The blame, University of Manitoba researchers say, lies with an antiquated and easily contaminated delivery system. That includes the rickety trucks that operate 24 hours a day and are rarely cleaned, leaky holding tanks — known to sometimes contain dead animals — and open buckets hauled back and forth from communal taps.
The study’s unsettling conclusion? Even when treatment is effective, many reserve residents drink water heavily laced with bugs such as E. coli, the same bacteria that triggered a water disaster in Walkerton, Ont.
“You wonder why in Canada these things are happening,” said Annemieke Farenhorst, the study’s lead author.
The federal government promised to eliminate the need for boil-water advisories on reserves within five years, and has earmarked $1.8 billion for the job, with a focus on treatment systems. A year after the Liberals were elected, First Nations leaders are still pushing for action.
Farenhorst says relatively small investments — such as buying a second truck to allow downtime for cleaning — could improve water safety in many places.
Just 51 per cent of the residents of Manitoba’s reserves have running water piped in directly from their treatment plant, while 13 per cent have their own wells. Another 31 per cent rely on water delivered by truck to underground cisterns like Whiteway’s, and five per cent have to obtain it by filling up buckets at communal standpipes.
Farenhorst said a boil-water advisory in Winnipeg last year generated mass anxiety and a 1,000-page report — though it turned out to be a false alarm.
“Meanwhile, we have this situation in First Nations that is very common, and it’s almost like it’s normalized.”