Yellowknifers may never know how lead got into school drinking water. It may not matter

Figuring out the source of lead contamination in the drinking water of two Yellowknife schools would be a major undertaking, according to the N.W.T. government — which is why it's focused on treating the lead levels instead of nailing down what's causing it.

Michael Auge, the manager of capital planning for the territory's Department of Education, Culture and Employment, said Thursday that the hope is the water will be fit to drink by the time school gets back in.

This week, the territory announced a suite of fixes for École William McDonald Middle School and Range Lake North School, the two schools where lead levels are higher than what health guidelines deem acceptable. Those fixes include replacing all the water fountains and taps used for food preparation at both schools, installing activated carbon filters at William McDonald to remove lead, and installing a flushing system at Range Lake North so water doesn't sit in the pipes.

Auge spoke to Trailbreaker host Shannon Scott about what the government is doing and why.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

A lot of people, since this news came out, have been wondering where this lead is coming from. But you don't know yet. Why is that? What's happening?

If you get lead in the system, it's usually leaching from the components of the plumbing system. But that could be a lot of things, whether it's the pipes, the soldering of the joints, or, you know, brass fittings in the fixtures and stuff like that. The amount of work it would take to pinpoint exactly what the source is within a school, it'd be very intrusive. You'd be have to rip up walls and do a big, thorough investigation.

So at this point we haven't pinpointed exactly what the source is, but we're just dealing with the lead anyway and taking it out of the water. 

Will we ever know exactly where it came from?

Probably not. Even if you identify one source of lead, there could still be another source of lead within the plumbing system too. So you'd have to check every single component, which is a lot of work.

Right. Like you're saying, that's every nut, every bolt.

Every pipe, every joint, every fixture — pretty much every inch of the plumbing system within the school. 

So instead we're just saying, 'There is lead. Now we're going to deal with the lead.' 

Yeah, exactly.

Are you going to replace the pipes in these schools, if it's coming from this system? Is that even feasible? 

We're not replacing the pipes at this time. With any school, there's usually a mid-life major renovation that you do to it, just to extend the life of it. When we get to that point in these schools, in William Mac in particular, we'll probably look at replacing some of the piping at that point — just because there will be work going on, it'll be a little easier to access the piping. So at that point we might replace some of it. 

But right now we're confident that the filters and replacing the fixtures is going to deal with the problem. So we don't see the need to. 

How far away are these schools from their mid-life renovations?

I know it's a few years out, but there's a lot of budgetary stuff that goes into that. And so making those choices, we don't know the exact timeline yet. 

We're dealing with the lead in these two schools in two different ways. William Mac is getting filters, Range Lake is getting a flushing system. I'm curious why the two schools are getting two different treatments.

The treatments are based on the results we got from Stantec, which did the testing for us of both schools, and the levels of lead in each.

There's two tiers of testing, one before flushing, one after flushing. With Range Lake, the Tier 1 testing showed there were a few outlets that were high in lead, but after the Tier 2 testing, after it had been flushed a little bit, those were below the Health Canada guidelines. So that kind of indicated that a flushing system there would work and would, you know, address the issue and remove the lead. So that's the solution we've gone with there. 

At William Mac, the levels were a little higher and the flushing didn't necessarily get rid of all the lead there. So for William Mac, then, we're looking at putting on the point-of-use filters that will take the lead out right before it exits the system and goes into your water bottle.

How will families and staff know that these systems are effective? 

Once the systems are put in place, we are going to be doing another round of testing. So we'll be doing full testing of all the same outlets and water fountains that we did last time. We'll get those test results back and we will be sharing those test results with everybody and letting you know.

We're fairly confident it's going to work, but we will give the results and go from there. 

Do we have a cost on all of this?

We have an estimate. We don't have it down to the dollar yet, but for William Mac, the cost there we're looking at about $75,000, $80,000 to replace all the fixtures, get the filters in, get extra filters for when we need to replace them. And then Range Lake, with the automated flushing system and replacing all the fixtures, is about $125,000.

When will students and staff be able to use the fountains again at these schools?

We are very hopeful that that's going to be in place before students go back to school, which I believe is Aug. 28, but again, that depends on us getting them in place and then that testing portion getting done. And then once the testing results are in, we share them with the Office of the Chief Public Health Officer, because they're the ones that actually have the health order in place that says do not consume from these. So they'll review the test results and hopefully give us the thumbs-up before students get back in the classrooms. 

And if not, we'll just continue on with what they were doing at the end of the previous school year?

Yes. If not, we will definitely still be providing outside sources of water, bottled water.

Other schools across the territory haven't yet had this more rigorous lead testing that William Mac and Range Lake have had. I know that there are plans to do more testing. How confident is the government, without having done that testing, that the water at all these other schools across the territory is safe to drink?

I can't really say how — I don't know how you put a number on how confident the government is, but you know, we are developing that fulsome program to do this more rigorous testing at all the schools. We intend to get that done at every school in the territory this school year.

So right now, we're finalizing what that final protocol looks like for the testing, how that's going to work, who's going to be involved in doing it, along with a prioritization list of all the schools in the territory, based on, you know, their age, the age of the students that are going to it, the results that we got with our first initial sampling there and some of the water quality information that we have for the communities and the schools. 

Do you have a target date for when that could start?

We're hopeful that that's going to start pretty much right away here. Once we finish up with William Mac and Range Lake and get everything in place there and complete the testing there. We're also looking at testing out N.J. McPherson this summer before the school year starts, because they did have one test that came in high previously.

So we're looking at getting that tested and that's going to be kind of our trial run for the protocol, for the testing procedure that we're doing, making sure that everybody that's involved knows what they're doing. We can take our time a little more during the summer here when there's no kids in there. And then from there, we'll roll it out based on the priority list that we're developing right now.