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A boil water advisory issued earlier in May for residents in many parts of Greater Sudbury was prompted by false positive tests, according to the city’s director of water and wastewater.
Shawn Chretien provided an update to city councillors at the meeting on Tuesday night.
“Based on the available evidence, I am confident in concluding that the water itself was never contaminated,” he said.
“Free chlorine residuals were present at each sampling site at levels sufficient to control bacterial growth. There was no loss of system pressure and two subsequent rounds of sampling returned entirely negative results. Given these factors, the most reasonable conclusion is that these results were false positives or otherwise not representative of the actual system water quality.”
On May 6, Public Health Sudbury and Districts issued the advisory for many areas in the city.
At the time, Dr. Emily Groot, the associate medical officer for the Sudbury and Manitoulin districts, said test samples showed “total coliform” bacteria in the system that needed to be investigated further.
According to Public Health Ontario, total coliforms are “a group of bacteria commonly found in animal waste, sewage, soil and vegetation. They are also found in the intestines of animals and humans.”
The advisory was lifted two days later after test results showed the water was safe.
How to improve in the future
Chretien told councillors on Tuesday that both the city and a third party looked into the issue.
“Both … conducted independent quality control investigations, reviewing staff training procedures, calibration records, operator logs and materials used,” he said. “Each found no likely source of contamination.”
He also said recent spring flooding was not a factor.
The city’s CAO, Shari Lichterman, said the situation is an example of looking at what went right and what could be improved in the future.
“Take away from this, we’re really going to take a look at the use of Sudbury Alerts and its use and come back with some recommendations on how we’ll use it, how we can improve it,” she said.
“If we’re going to use it, we need to get a lot more subscribers on it.”
An alert did go out to people in the city who had signed up for the program, but Lichterman said using that system “was limited in its reach” so the city “focused on the other channels first.”
Coun. Al Sizer said it made sense to err on the side of caution.
“It actually shows the system is working,” he said.
“I thank the staff and everybody involved for handling it in such a professional manner. This only goes to reassure our public that the system is safe and operating as it should.”