Simon Says

This letter to the Morning Star editor appeared on Sunday, January 24th:

All together now...repeat after Simon:

"Water system works for all:

In the wee hours of Boxing Day morning, the Mission Hill water treatment plant experienced a major equipment malfunction, effectively shutting down the plant.

How many Vernon and Coldstream residents had their holidays with their families disrupted by this event?  Not one.

This is because we are lucky enough to have multiple sources for our water.  Operators were able to switch to the Duteau Creek supply without missing a beat.

The problem at Mission Hill was that an equipment failure prevented the pumps from bringing water up from Kal Lake to the plant.  The Duteau system transports water by gravity.  Because we have the ability to switch supplies, we don't have to pay huge bills for emergency services to fix the power to the Mission Hill plant.

Imagine the difficulty and cost of getting a plumber at 1 a.m. on Boxing Day?  Getting the plant up and running can happen in a thoughtful, cost-saving manner.  Another benefit to the Duteau system is that the water is quite soft which has many benefits in your home.  The Duteau Creek water system is also not susceptible to the threat from invasive mussels.

A local group that is getting a lot of ink in the paper would like to mothball the five-year-old Duteau plant that we just spent $20 million on in order to have a single source from Okanagan Lake.  This is the lowest possible source so it would require significant mechanical systems and uninterrupted power to push all that water up to the residents.  As well as being very costly, sole sourcing from Okanagan Lake would be very susceptible to a mussel problem if that were to occur.  We do not have water rights on Okanagan Lake and obtaining them now would put us at the bottom of the list of water priorities.  All other water rights would have to be honoured before ours.

I hope that when the decisions are made to move forward with an agreed upon master water plan, that it retains multiple sources that minimize our risk of disruption by power/mechanical outages as well as natural threats."   Steve Simon

"So what does Kelowna do?" asks Kia, then replying to the question:  "they had better equipment--and likely better electricians--in the first place."

Perhaps that's true.

Seems Mr. Simon has made the decision to risk his family's safety from inordinately (and unacceptably) high levels at Duteau of Trihalomethane and Haloacetic disinfection byproducts by liking the softer water....an uneducated and very stupid trade-off!    He also doesn't care that it costs so much more to run the Duteau plant--especially during winter--when irrigation is shut off.   So does he still think "we don't have to pay huge bills?"  What nonsense!   He appears to prefer the year-round huge water consumption and base rate costs are OK!

And a "local group getting a lot of ink in the paper?"  The Morning Star newspaper did the general public--and those ~1,000 people who signed their water petition--a disservice, as they wouldn't even print the most recent Press Release from Citizens for Changes to the Master Water Plan.

Oh...and by the way, Okanagan Lake is THE consultants' and politicians' and bureaucrats' choice for long-term supply to a growing North Okanagan population.  Seems Mr. Simon would rather wait another 20 years to apply for an OL water license--when in fact GVW has already done so...they're simply not keen to mothball Duteau because it would admit what everyone else now knows...that it was a $29 million dollar waste to build it when over 80 per cent of its treated water in summer goes onto farm crops (with domestic customers paying--because agriculture rates are far too low!).


Duteau should never have been built in the first place!
Irrigation and domestic lines should have been separated--waterline twinning--as the original Master Water Plan 2002 recommended.

Simple Simon.
Believing what his political/bureaucratic friend tells him.
You're being fooled Mr. Simon!

"Good that Simon didn't pursue the field of forensics," adds Kia.

Cold cases would never be solved if he had.