WINNIPEG – City officials say Winnipeg’s water is safe, and the samples that showed contamination and sparked a two day boil water advisory earlier this year were false. But what caused the mistake still isn’t known.
The city released a summary of a report Friday from an external consultant brought in after the boil water scare.
“It appears most likely that the source of the positive samples originated in either a sample collection or laboratory contamination event,” says the report, which was submitted Thursday to the Office of Drinking Water, the provincial regulator of drinking water.
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The city’s 700,000 residents were advised to boil their water on January 27 as a precaution, after routine testing at six sites showed the presence of coliform bacteria. The advisory was in place for two days and was lifted after subsequent tests came back clean.
“The water was, and is, safe to drink,” said Geoffrey Patton, Acting Director of Water and Waste in a news conference Friday. “The independent assessment provides compelling evidence there was no contamination in Winnipeg’s water distribution system during the event that occurred in January 2015.”
But it’s still not clear exactly what caused the scare. The review released Friday “could not find any definitive step” in the sampling or laboratory handling of water samples that resulted in a false positive test results. But it made some recommendations for improving the sampling and testing process.
“A simple touching your eye, touching the edge of the bottle,” said Patton, “there’s a number of processes humans are involved in.”
“How do we prevent that?” said Tim Shanks, Manager of Water Services, “well we’re going to continue to train and develop staff, continue to improve standard operating procedures.”
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Shortly after the boil water advisory was lifted, officials suggested the original test results had been “false positives” and the province ordered an investigation into the security of Winnipeg’s drinking water.
“It’s a vulnerability assessment,” water and waste director Diane Sacher told a city council committee in February. “It’s to look at whether our system is vulnerable to possible contamination.” The city also launched an audit into how water samples are taken and analyzed by a private laboratory.
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The province also asked the city to look at whether it can better isolate neighbourhoods into zones to avoid future blanket advisories that could be unnecessary, Sacher said.
Only the executive summary of the water review was released Friday: the full report won’t be publicly released until provincial officials have finished examining it.
With files from Canadian Press
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