Have you ever wondered where the water comes from when you turn on the tap? Hi, my name
is Barry, and today, I'm going to show you how water gets treated.
The journey begins here, at Lake Ontario.
An intake pipe, big enough to drive a car through, extends two kilometres offshore and
lies at the bottom of the lake Ontario - 10 metres deep. The end of this pipe is covered
by a screen that prevents large debris from entering the Water Treatment Facility.
Let's go there now. . .
We're now at the facility and I'm going to show you each step of the water treatment process.
Here the raw water first enters the facility. Every day we can process
up to 820 million litres of water. That could fill up to 330 Olympic sized swimming pools.
Once inside the facility the water flows through these traveling screens where a copper mesh prevents smaller items like fish and plant life from entering.
At the Lakeview Water Treatment Facility, we turn oxygen into ozone .
But first, we have to get the oxygen to our facility. The easiest way to transport oxygen
is in liquid form, and once it's here, we keep it cool in these tanks
which is why ice forms, even on a summer day like today. We then transport the oxygen
into our facility where it's converted into ozone. Let's take a look.
This is the ozone generator room. Inside this generator,
an electrical current is passed through ther liquid oxygen and converts it into ozone gas.
Next, we diffuse the ozone into the water as tiny bubbles.
This is a part of the disinfection process.
The ozonated water remains in large concrete contact tanks for 30 minutes before we add
sodium bisulphate to quench or remove the ozone before the water
goes on to the next step.
This makes up the first step of the disinfection process.
We'll now look at the next step in water treatment.
The disinfected water flows from the ozone contactors, to the
Biologically Activated Carbon Contactor.
Here, the water flows in from the
top and filters down through small pieces of carbon that have been heat treated and
resemble the carbon in a home water filter.
Harmless bacteria live in the crevices of these tiny carbon pieces. These bacteria consume
the organic material broken up by the disinfection process.
This step helps remove alot of the bad taste and odour from the water.
These tanks are 5 meters deep, with over 3 meters of biologically activated carbon at
the bottom.
Every 5-7 days these tanks are backwashed. Clean air and water are forced
backwards through the system, to break up and flush out anything
that's stuck in the carbon.
Next we'll look at the ultra-filtration membrane process.
The water flows from the Biologically Activated Carbon Contactor to a series of
filter membrane units. The units are made up of tiny membrane fibres, like this .
This is a model of a membrane fiber.
A fibre is a tiny tube with millions of microscopic holes on the outside.
We draw the water into the tube using vacuum pressure.
The holes are so small that only water can pass through and pathogens, bacteria and particles are left outside on the outside.
To filter the water on a large scale we have 12 membrane trains, and each hold 55 thousand
litres of water. Each train has 672 modules, that equals over 282 million membrane fibres.
We lifted the cassette from the train.
Now we can see the fibres are grouped into modules.
Each modules is made up of about 35,000 fibres.
Now the water is clean and almost ready for distribution.
This blue pipe collects clean water from the membrane trains. Before the water heads out
to the reservoir, we add a small amount of chlorine to keep it clean. We also add a a
small amount of fluoride to help promote dental health.
As we prepare the water to leave the facility, we constantly monitor its quality to ensure
that it meets the Ministry of the Environment's stringent water quality standards. We also
test the water manually four times a day for over a hundred parameters.
And back here in the control room, our operators monitor the entire facility and each stage
of the water treatment process.
For example, they control the backwashing that we saw in the Biologically Activated Carbon Contactor gallery.
They ensure the membrane trains are functioning properly, and they determine chemical
dosages, such as ozone.
The blue pipes from the facility carry the clean water to an underground reservoir.
Reservoirs are huge storage tanks for water and are located all around Peel region.
Pumping stations push the water out into a network of underground water mains that connect
to your tap.
Water treatment is a complicated process. It takes up to 4 days from the time the water
leaves Lake Ontario until it reaches your tap.
And it's ready to drink.
For more information about water contact the region of peel at nine oh five seven nine
one seven eight zero zero or online at w w w dot peel region dot c a