Valley to get first Drinking Water Protection Plan

Philip Round
Comox Valley Echo

Friday, July 04, 2008
The Comox Valley is to be the first place in British Columbia to have an enforceable Drinking Water Protection Plan.

The news was revealed to Courtenay councillors on Wednesday by the area's medical health officer, Dr. Charmaine Enns.

She said the decision to initiate such a plan for the Valley "didn't come painlessly" and would have serious consequences for anyone who violated it.

She had requested ministerial endorsement for the development of such a plan in her role as drinking water officer for the North Island, and this has now been given.

Enns said she believed there are risks associated with the area's public water supply.

A lot of work had been done locally on watershed risk assessment, and in planning for improvements to the main supply from the Puntledge River and Comox Lake.

But measures to adequately protect the quality and quantity of the supply needed real teeth, and Cabinet endorsement of an agreed plan in due course would ensure such teeth had bite.

She said she regarded existing drinking water intake arrangements as "highly vulnerable right now"

The issues might be solved by massive expenditure on a deep-water intake at Comox Lake with associated protective measures, but whatever the solution, current arrangements had to be improved.

However, she did not suggest the present quality of potable water is unacceptable. It regularly passes all the tests.

But a perception exists that alternative bottled water is both better and safer than tap water - and that is simply not the case, she insisted.

There are no regulations governing the content of bottled water costing, per litre, up to 5,000 times the price of regulated tap water, Enns explained.

In the Comox Valley, it costs $1.72 for 4,000 litres of potable water from the public supply.

Yet it cost about the same amount for a single 750-millilitre bottle of branded water in local stores.

"There's quite a movement against bottled water," she noted.

"It has its place - for example, for emergency storage - but it's not necessarily any better," she said.

And as there is no regulation, it might actually be worse.