Alma residents asked to conserve water to prevent summer boil order

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Alma residents are being asked to conserve water after a large drop in the village’s water supply last week.

Fundy Albert Mayor Bob Rochon said Monday that staff noticed a “lot of water was used” on Wednesday night into Thursday, prompting the municipality to send out a water conservation notice to residents over the weekend.

“What that event is we don’t know,” he said, adding it may not be possible to pinpoint an exact cause of the water loss.

Rochon said the notice was sent out as a precaution to encourage the residents to cut down on their water usage before the arrival of the tourism season, and to prevent the need for a boil water advisory over the summer.

“When tourism is in high gear we’re using well beyond the amount of water the system can generate,” he said, noting the village’s water system was not built to sustain thousands of people that flood the area during the summer months.

“During the peak summer season, we’re using five times the holding capacity of that reservoir each day,” said Rochon.

The municipality will be using a temporary water line to Fundy National Park, so the community can use the water until a new water source is brought online. The temporary line was used last summer while there was a boil advisory in Alma.

Rochon said the temporary water line should be put in place later this month, but is not expected to be ready before Mother’s Day weekend, the first major weekend of the tourism season.

Staff did identify a leak in the connection point where the temporary line would be connected to the national park’s system, and the mayor said it will be fixed in the next few weeks.

In the meantime, Rochon said the municipal team is asking residents to cut back on their water use by doing things like taking shorter showers, running full laundry loads instead of partial loads, checking for leaks in faucets, toilets and hoses, and avoiding water usage during peak hours of the day.

Notices have been put on the Fundy Albert social media and website, and Rochon said the municipality has also been emailing residents with a list of ways to conserve water.

Other measures will be put in place, such as installing portable toilets in Alma, to ease the demand on the water system.

“Even though it’s just a small amount it helps to save and conserve water,” Rochon said.

With the return of warmer weather, Rochon said Alma was busy over the weekend as businesses and restaurants began to open up.

A new water source has been identified at a site in the area, and the work to connect it to the existing water system will be done in phases, Laura Leger, a project engineer with the firm Englobe, said in a previous interview with Brunswick News.

Leger had said the tender for the construction work is expected to go out in late spring or early summer, and the design work for the new system is ongoing.

In November, Fundy Albert received more than $12 million from the three levels of government to build two new wells and new water supply infrastructure to reduce turbidity levels and increase water supply to meet the high demand.

Rochon said on Monday that land owner and Indigenous consultations are currently underway.