School District 57 has received the results of drinking water tests on 48 schools and District-held facilities. Of those facilities, seven contained levels of lead deemed unacceptable in accordance with standards established by the Canadian Drinking Water Quality guidelines. Those facilities are:
established in the Guidelines.
Those schools are: Edgewood Elementary, Foothills Elementary, Heritage Elementary, Kool Kats Daycare, Nukko Lake Elementary, Nusdeh Yoh Elementary and Pineview Elementary.
“What typically happened in buildings that were constructed before 1989/90, there was solder that was used on the copper pipes that had a higher percentage of lead than today,” explains Nino Maletta, the District’s General Manager of Facility Services.
But the testing has generated a lot of questions. For instance, in Heritage Elementary, the testing produced both high levels and low levels, depending on where in the school the test was done. Nukko Lake Elementary is a newer school, built well after the cut off date.
“Some of them are little surprising,” says Sharon Cairns, Superintendent for District 57. “Nevertheless, we’re putting into place a plan to flush them [the pipes], test the facilities again and develop a plan along with Northern Health and our engineering firm to make sure certain these are all safe for September.”
The pipes in those seven facilities will be flushed out daily to address the higher than acceptable levels of lead. But now the District has to do further testing to pinpoint the source of the lead in each case, whether it’s the pipes, the solder or even the faucets.
“It’s not black and white,” says Maletta.