Lambton area water system exploring supplying Kettle Point

The board of the Lambton Area Water Supply System has backed continuing talks with the Kettle and Stony Point First Nation about becoming its drinking water supplier.

Article content

Bev Hand, mayor of Point Edward and the board’s chairperson, said system’s board endorsed a memorandum of understanding this week that still must be accepted by the First Nation.

“They made an initial contact June of last year,” Hand said.

“They were looking for alternate supply strategies” for more efficient and effective methods of providing treated water for the First Nation’s own customers, she said.

According to the memorandum, the First Nation’s water treatment plant can “no longer handle a growing community” and is “at its maximum safe level of water treatment.”

Some of its processes “that were standard in water treatment” in the 1990s “are now very much out of date,” the document said.

Also, a building supplying the treatment plant “is structurally unsafe and cannot provide flows that are needed,” and the ceiling in the treatment plant collapsed earlier this year, it said.

Article content

“A memorandum of understanding is only an investigation” Hand said.

“We have to protect the membership first,” she said.

The water supply system owned by Sarnia, Point Edward, St. Clair Township, Warwick Township, Plympton-Wyoming and Lambton Shores has a water treatment plant where Lake Huron meets the St. Clair River and supplies water to approximately 120,000 users.

It also supplies water to Brooke-Alvinston, as well as emergency water supplies to Petrolia and Chatham-Kent, Harper said.

The First Nation’s water needs will be included in preparation in 2025 of a new five-year water master plan for the system to help it “understand what impacts there might be” from becoming Kettle and Stony Point’s water supplier, Hand said.

Article content

Based on “preliminary hydraulic modeling” it’s anticipated the system has capacity to supply the First Nation, said general manager Clinton Harper.

“We’d want to look at it from an overall system perspective, with the First Nation too, so they understand where exactly they fit in that puzzle, if it’s something they’re interested in proceeding with,” he said.

“This is the start of a long conversation we’re going to have,” Harper said.

“Everyone agreed to carry on the work,” Hand said about this week’s endorsement of the memorandum by the board which includes representatives of each of the system’s owner municipalities.

The memorandum says the First Nation would be a customer of the system and would pay for engineering and construction of metering chambers required to connect the two water systems.

“We always want to be able to help someone, but the caveat is membership first, so we have to explore” if there are issues with supplying the First Nation, and how they might be resolved, Hand said.

“We want to be able to do this, but it’s just checking off the feasibility and impact,” she said.

First Nation officials didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment about the memorandum and discussions with the water supply system.

[email protected]

Article content