Epcor has lifted the non-essential water use ban that began on Monday.
The utilities company announced the end of the ban during a news conference on Friday. Epcor earlier announced that they had expected the ban to last until Sunday.
“We’ve completed repairs to the E.L Smith Water Treatment Plant and we are operating at full capacity,” said Frank Mannarino, senior vice president of corporate services at Epcor. “While we’re still restoring supplies in the reservoir system, we’re comfortable at this point that the system has stabilized enough to lift the water restrictions.”
According to Epcor, efforts to conserve water save over a 100 million litres throughout the week.
Epcor also provided a breakdown of the events surrounding the water ban.
At around 2:30 a.m. on Monday, water entered the vault containing high voltage electrical cables. These cables led to water pumps, which led to water not being put through the system, despite being clean.
While the plant was down, water was instead used from the Rossdale Water Treatment Plant, that was not operating at full capacity due to construction work. By Tuesday morning, Rossdale had been restored to its full capacity.
Crews spent the rest of Tuesday and Wednesday engineering the solution to get the system back up and running, with the plans being put into fruition Wednesday night.
By Thursday morning the plant had been partially restored, becoming fully restored before the end of the day.
Epcor will also be launching a full review into the events to determine how to prevent an incident like this from happening again.
You can hear the news conference down below:
