Saint John Water has received a total of about 103 calls since the west side switchover to the new wellwater source back in September of last year, according to commissioner Brent McGovern.
Speaking at a media briefing at the South Bay Wellfield late Friday afternoon, McGovern tells CHSJ News initial calls were related to aesthetics but over the last month or so there’s been a transition to calls about plumbing leaks which he says have been linked to copper piping.
Saint John Water is now working with Dalhousie University and CBCL Engineering to analyze specific sections of copper that have corroded to better understand the issue. He says they’ll start to get results within the next one to two months.
But they do have a working theory.
McGovern says when you change water chemistry as they’ve done you can have dissolving of scale buildup.
“When you have dissolving of that scale buildup you can have pipes that were near the point of failure, more abruptly come to failure,” says McGovern.
“A new scale will start to form with the new water quality on the inside of these pipes that will again act as a protective barrier and that doesn’t happen overnight…we expect at this point that this is a short term phenomenon that piping that was vulnerable has suddenly come to leak in some instances and that it will normalize again and the infrastructure will gain a new state of equilibrium essentially.”
We asked if the calls are concentrated in any particular area of the west side and were told they aren’t.