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City of Brandon Utility’s Review of Emergency Response Complete

The City of Brandon’s water utility has reviewed and tightened its emergency procedures following a small sewage spill at its municipal wastewater treatment facility on Victoria Avenue East.

 

At approximately 5:20 a.m. on Sunday, November 6th, the city’s municipal wastewater treatment facility at 4040 Victoria Avenue East experienced a power bump as a result of a wider Hydro outage in Brandon. The majority of the treatment process was unaffected by the power bump, however, the computer that controls the facility’s treatment reactors failed to reset properly.

 

As the same Hydro outage had also affected the city’s municipal water treatment facility on 26th Street North, an alarm that normally alerts its 24-7 staff to issues at the municipal wastewater treatment facility did not sound. As a result, approximately 2,000 litres of semi-treated sewage overflowed from one of the plant’s reactors over the course of one hour. It is estimated that 90 % of the sewage spill flowed directly into an on-site catch basin that returns directly to the facility, while an estimated 10 % flowed into an on-site drainage ditch. None of the sewage spill left the facility’s site or reached the Assiniboine River.

 

The incident was investigated immediately by city officials and, as a result, enhanced emergency alerting measures are now in place. In the event of any power outage at any of the city’s utility facilities, an automatic human response will be triggered.

 

“Contrary to how much we would like it to be otherwise, no system is perfect,” notes Patrick Pulak, the City of Brandon’s Deputy Director of Engineering Services and Water Resources. “No matter how prepared we are to prevent accidents, it’s incidents like this one that make us step back and review our procedures and improve upon them so something like this doesn’t happen again.”

 

The City of Brandon filed a preliminary report with Manitoba Conservation within two hours of Sunday morning’s incident and will file a final report to the department later today. The City of Brandon’s municipal wastewater treatment facility treats in the range of 20,000,000 litres of sewage per day.

 

For more information, please contact:

 

Patrick Pulak
Deputy Director of Engineering Services and Water Resources, City of Brandon
729-2477

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