I've posted on this subject once already but somehow it has disappear so I'll try it again
It's been 10 days and still no water. We had the excavator at river and install a different type of conduit to aid in the flow of water to the exterior wet well.
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Exterior Wet Well
With HDPE Conduit |
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Exterior Wet Well
With Culvert Conduit |
During the process we ran one of the pumps to keep the silt and sand from running into the river since we are out of the work window with respect to clouding up the river. As the water flowed into the interior wet well it brought material in with it. Because there is so much sand and silt already in the wet well from delayed maintenance last year and from this years run off the screens at the bottom of the pumps became clogged and could no longer draw water. The only solution is to vacuum out both wet wells. But as the name implies: they are wet. There is no way to stop water from entering the exterior wet well. We'll have to do it by guessing. It is small and the water is only around 4 feet high. The interior wet well is lower and has close to 5 to 6 feet of water. To clean it out we need to stop the flow and the only way to do that is to plug the pipe connecting the two wells. I sourced out some options last year but did not follow through because of money. This year we're so far behind the 8-ball saving money is almost secondary to making sure we have water. To make a long story short we ordered a plug and it took 6 days to get from Winnipeg to Kimberley but the wrong size was shipped. Our supplier re-ordered and was trying to have the shipping process expedited. Since originally posting the river has dropped quite a bit and I've been able to get a better look at the connection between the exterior and interior wet well. The pipe connecting the two has an interior diameter of about 22" and it is close to 4/5's plugged with only a very little gap for water to move. As I mentioned in the September 5th post, this is has to be the "unknown" reason why the pump house was unable to operate even after we cleaned the intake.
We've contacted the City and made arrangements to buy water from the fire hydrant near the reservoir to get us through. Hopefully, by Tuesday we'll be adding water to the reservoir.
