Preparatory work with engineering firm AECOM on the Rose Valley Water Treatment Plant is nearing completion. The City of West Kelowna is still working with the Province of British Columbia on final approval of the water treatment plant site.
Construction on the Rose Valley Water Treatment Plant, which will serve the Lakeview Water System, is expected to begin in early 2019, be completed by late November 2020 and commissioned in early 2021. Originally, the City of West Kelowna expected to start construction no sooner than 2021, dependent upon available funding. However, the construction timing was advanced significantly thanks to a $41 million grant from Canada and B.C.
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Once completed, the treatment plant will provide multi-barrier protection in place of the Lakeview System’s current facility, which was built in the early 1970s, provides only chlorination treatment and which the City of West Kelowna inherited in 2011. Once the new treatment plant is completed, the City of West Kelowna plans to construct connections to the Pritchard/Sunnyside and West Kelowna Estates Systems. These systems, which the city inherited at the time of incorporation in 2007, also provide only chlorination treatment. Unlike a multi-barrier process, chlorination only treatment does not meet federal and provincial drinking water standards nor does it resolve recurring turbidity issues that have led to multiple water quality issues within these systems over the past two years due to unusual and unseasonable weather patterns, activities in the watershed, and historic flooding seasons in 2017 and 2018.
The Pritchard/Sunnyside and West Kelowna Estates Systems could be connected as soon as two years after the water treatment plant is commissioned, subject to available funding and budget approvals.
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