Lingering water problems in Owen Sound have prompted city council to seek disaster relief from the province.
At one point this winter 320 homes in the city were without running water, while crews scrambled to thaw and bypass frozen services. More than a kilometre of frozen water mains were dug up and replaced.
“Somewhere under the street in one of the mains it's still frozen, from how I understand it. When the spring comes the frost continues to go down into the ground before it comes back out,” says Owen Sound resident Brent Jefferies.
The city's director of operations says the water is flowing to all homes and businesses now, but water main work will continue for several more weeks and the repair bill is expected to pass the million dollar mark.
At Monday night’s council meeting, it was decided that the city would ask the province to declare Owen Sound a disaster area, so it could qualify for disaster relief funding to help pay the bill for repairing the damaged Infrastructure.
The purpose of Ontario disaster relief program is to help communities recover from natural disasters, such as tornados or flooding. Owen Sound’s Mayor Ian Boddy compares the deep freeze here to the ice storm that hit the Greater Toronto Area two years ago, causing wide spread power outages.
“It's the same thing, it's utility… it's a disaster,” he says. “We hope we don't need to wait too long to hear from the province.”
Jefferies says he was without running water for three weeks and that seemed like a disaster at the time.
“I think plane crash and tornados, but in the same vein we were without water for 23 days we had to adapt to a different storm,” he says.
They city is hoping to have some of the main roads that were dug up repaved shortly, but there's still a least three locations around the city where the digging hasn't even started yet.
