First Nation communities in Canada remotely monitor the quality of their drinking water

Background

Over the past few years, the small communities in Canada have been struggling with managing the quality of their water systems and incidents of contamination have lead to a number of accidents. The Government of Canada has started a large project to provide safe potable water in First Nations communities by improving the infrastructure and training water & wastewater operators as part of the First Nations Water Management Strategy. The Government has also decided to install remote water quality monitoring in the First Nations communities in order to ensure that plant operators can be alerted in case of an anomaly in the water quality. This is particularly important to assure the necessary standards, especially as there is a high turnover of plant operators.

s::can’s solution

The water quality of the small communities is being monitored by s::can’s micro::station which combines several s::can probes and the con::cube, a state of the art controller. The micro::station is designed for online monitoring of water quality parameters in clean media and is a complete, compact and versatile solution. Each monitoring station consists of a con::cube with four s::can sensors (spectro::lyser, ammo::lyser, chlori::lyser and pH::lyser). A total of nine parameters are measured at each station, including NTU, TOC, DOC, EC, pH, Temp, NO3, Total Chlorine and Free Chlorine. The system was installed in combination with a decentralized event detection system based on s::can’s moni::tool, that continuously analyses spectral alarm parameters to detect changes resulting from untypical, possibly harmful, water quality events. Real time data is then automatically transferred to an information network that links all First Nation water treatment plants to the Alberta SuperNet. moni::tool is a revolutionary new platform for the management of measuring stations, online probes and analysers. Whether it is installed in a large monitoring network or as a standalone station, moni::tool’s intuitive software and state of the art features are an essential backbone for sensor and station management.

Reference Story