Iqaluit city council to decide on new source for drinking water
CBC
The city of Iqaluit will need to choose a new potable water source by the end of the summer.
At a meeting Thursday night, council members were presented with two options for what that source might be.
Since about 2015, alarm bells have been sounding that the city's current water reservoir— Lake Geraldine — is too small and unreliable to meet Iqaluit's growing population.
The new supply will come from either Unnamed Lake or the Sylvia Grinnell River.
But Iqaluit's chief administrative officer, Amy Elgersma, said staff recommend Unnamed Lake.
"We do have experience of course working with Unnamed Lake now, in the 2019 year where we did draw water from that water source," said Elgersma.
The city declared a second water emergency in 2019, when the Apex River was too low to restock Lake Geraldine. The city supplemented the water supply by pumping water from Unnamed Lake, about three kilometres from the Apex river, into Lake Geraldine.
"It is a feasible option to be able to run a pipeline with minimal power requirements and infrastructure compared to some of the other options," said Elgersma.
If the city council does vote to use Unnamed Lake as the water source they will also need to choose the system to collect the water.
The recommendation by city staff is a summer-only pumping operation. That would mean the city would only collect water in the summer and store it in a reservoir.
The summer-only pumping option would require the city to build a new reservoir because Lake Geraldine doesn't have the storage capacity to sustain the growing population.
"If we don't have that, we can deliver all the water we want in the summer but without the reservoir we are running out of water by May," said Walter Orr, a civil engineer with Stantec, who made the presentation to council.
"The summer only projects require a reservoir in the near term."
The viability of Unnamed Lake is still being studied. Data has been collected since 2018 but more outflow measurements are needed to confirm the water balance, according to the presentation.
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