UPDATED: Village without water after valve failure

DISLEY, Sask. – The village of Disley remains out of water. Home to about 75 people, residents in the community near Lumsden said water stopped coming out of the taps early Wednesday morning.

“I was trying to have a shower and discovered, well, this isn’t working. So yup, that was my first inkling,” explained resident Ken Rempel.

Another resident, Collin Wadsworth, said “I checked the taps, sure enough there was no water. After that I received about two more texts from people around town asking. Everybody here was out of water just nobody knows why.”

The Buffalo Water Treatment Plant came back online Wednesday after a power outage. Thursday morning, SaskWater confirmed on its end, water is flowing to the village, they believed the issue was with the village’s distribution to individual homes.

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It turns out a check-valve in the Disley reservoir is to blame. Mayor Gord Wilson didn’t think the failed valve is related to the treatment plant’s power problems.

Related or not, replacing the valve is tricky. 5,000 gallons of water need to be pumped out and trucked to Disley’s lagoon.

“We can’t fill the line until we get this check valve in to prime the pumps to get water to Disley,” said Wilson.

Just when that repair work will happen remains to be seen.

“We have no idea how long it’ll take. For instance, we have to glue this pipe on. It’ll take three hours for the glue to dry. We have to drain the reservoir, that takes a day. It could be down till Friday night, or it could start up tonight. We don’t know,” he said.

In the meantime, residents have been buying water in Lumsden. They can also fill buckets at the pump house in Disley, but that water would still have to be boiled.

“We’re under a boil until, well, we don’t know how long. Until the tests come back positive,” the mayor said.

He added this is the first time Disley has been without water for such an extended period of time.