CARSTAIRS - The Town of Carstairs council has approved a new inspection program for the monitoring of inflow and infiltration in the municipality’s sewage and stormwater system.
“What this does is creates a program for us to look at any groundwater infiltration into the town’s system,” said CAO Carl McDonnell. “If we have heavy rains we could have some infiltration so over the years we have separated our stormwater system from our sanitary system.
“We still find there is a certain amount of infiltration through groundwater. This program identifies how we will start tracking that and then how we can mitigate to reduce the amount of infiltration that we have into the sanitary system.”
The overall goal of the program is to “help us with our capacity at the lagoon system, to ensure that we aren’t getting too much infiltration into there,” he said.
The public works employees who are doing routine inspections of the sanitary and storm systems will now be recording further information under the program, he said.
The program’s policy statement reads: “The Town of Carstairs will inspect the sanitary collection system to determine areas of concern for inflow and infiltration of stormwater runoff and groundwater infiltration as per the inflow and infiltration program.
“Areas of concern will be further inspected and any repairs needed will be budgeted into the operating budget or on a larger project scale into the capital budget.”
The budget for the program itself is covered by the existing public works budget, he said.
The inspection program will have several phases. The first phase will involve visual inspection and making a priority list of repairs and maintenance items, followed by Phase 2 and 3, which could include closed circuit TV inspection if needed, he said.
The program was approved by way of motion at the recent regularly scheduled council meeting.
