School’s boil-water advisory may be lifted

The boil-water advisory at Our Lady of the Way School in Stratton could be lifted this week after staff there realized chorine levels injected into the water to disinfect it were too low to be effective.
Last week, Veikko Long, a water systems specialist from Thunder Bay, was at the school to review the system, as well as train staff on how to properly take water samples and run the equipment.
“He found that we were misled in how much chlorine should be used in the water,” Chris Howarth, superintendent of business for the Northwest Catholic District School Board, said Tuesday.
Previously, the board had been advised by contractors on how much chlorine would be needed to purify the water.
“We only had one-quarter to one-fifth the amount of chlorine in the water that we should have,” Howarth noted. “There was no way it was going to work, not with that amount of chlorine in the water.”
Howarth said staff immediately went with the new levels as advised by the consultant.
“Immediately things began looking better,” he said.
Already this week, the school has received one clean water sample back from the lab.
Two consecutive clean water samples are required before the Northwestern Health Unit will lift its boil-water advisory.
Howarth said they should get the results from a second sample taken at the end of last week any day now, and hoped that would mark the end of the school’s water woes.
“We’re hopeful that it is,” he said.
Our Lady of the Way School has been under the current boil-water advisory since Oct. 19. One also had been in effect there for much of the previous school year.