Business View - November 2015 165
Waugh-Cress discusses the first project on the list: “The
Pugwash Water Project has been in the works for quite a
while. In 2012, CBCL, an engineering firm in Atlantic Cana-
da, conducted a sampling of 10 percent of the residential
wells in the village of Pugwash and the surrounding area.
It was found that, of those wells tested, 80 percent were
above the aesthetic criteria for things like salt, suspended
solids, hardness, iron, and manganese. Thirty percent of
those wells were above Canadian drinking water guide-
lines for arsenic and some for uranium and selenium.
So, from those well samples, we identified a very serious
health risk for the people in the community. Some things
were easy to deal with – if the water was salty, you could
spit it out, but things like arsenic and uranium are taste-
less and odorless, so you could think that you had perfect-
ly good water for years and still be drinking very dangerous
chemicals.” Waugh-Cress stresses that these chemicals
in the well water were not industrial run-offs that had got-
ten into the underground supply, but were rather natural
to the geography of the area.
He continues the narrative: “We spoke to every resident
who had the compromised wells and we began the pro-
cess of developing a centralized, groundwater distribution
system, which we had to do from scratch because, until
now, everyone in the community has had to rely on drilled
or dug wells. So, the next phase was to locate a ground-
water source to supply the water system. We had to go
out quite a ways. We drilled more than a dozen test wells
to find a stable supply, and we did find one approximately
five kilometers from the village limit in the winter of 2014.
The supply is very good quality and very good quantity and
we’re very happy to have found it.”
After determining that many of the area’s residents were
drinking tainted water, and that there was a good source
of clean water not too far away, the municipality’s next
task was figuring out how to get the water to the residents.
“It turns out that finding the water and planning for all this
was the easy part. Now we had to build the well-field in-
frastructure, the water treatment plant, the storage res-
ervoirs, the transmission lines, and the distribution mains
INFRASTRUCTURE
