Halifax Water needs to improve the way it tracks risks to drinking water and do a better job of planning for long-term infrastructure upgrades, a new report from Halifax’s auditor general has found.
The report said in order to manage any potential threats to drinking water, Halifax Water must keep an up-to-date inventory of the risks to its services.
But the audit found gaps in the information that the utility uses to plan for infrastructure replacement.
9 recommendations accepted Halifax Water accepted all the report’s recommendations.
During its review, the audit found three former staff members could still access and edit the program used to track water sample results.
Track whether any actions made in compliance with the Environment Department are followed.
Report on surplus buildings On Wednesday, the auditor general also released a report that looks at how the municipality handles surplus buildings and land.
It said the municipality could save money by paying better attention to unused properties.
Municipal staff often don’t review holdings for years and only consider the buildings and land after people, businesses or councillors request information, the audit said.
It recommended staff look at whether an annual review is feasible and if it can improve how it tracks the inventory.

There, in a shaded courtyard, we each sample a cup of water that flows from a drinking fountain.
There sit two Friesen’s devices, called Source Hydropanels.
Friesen believes installations like this one could soon be providing clean, quality drinking water to homes, schools and businesses across the United States and beyond – and why not, to rural villages, desert towns or urban slums in the developing world.
“Water stress is a human condition,” says Friesen, who is founder and CEO of Zero Mass Water, the Arizona-based startup that makes Source.
But Friesen, a materials scientist and professor of engineering at Arizona State University, has already installed the Source in eight countries, including Ecuador, Jordan, Mexico and the Philippines.
“With us, you get to hold the result of that solar energy in a cup,” he says.
In 2007, he founded Fluidic Energy, which develops battery technology.
“He’s going to get water out of the air.
He’s done it Arizona.
“There is an awful lot of far from pure water being drunk in the United States,” says Battle, whose Berkeley house Freisen took me for the demonstration of Source.

But for one Idaho Falls family, the humanitarian plight in one African country is never far from their minds, and they are working to bring the issues there to the forefront.
Three college degrees later, Musingi has settled in Idaho Falls with his wife, Cristal, and their four children.
“So when I came back to the United States, I started to think ‘what can I do to help my people back home from this epidemic?’ They are suffering from all these infections and diseases that were caused by unclean water.” Through their nonprofit organization Clean Water in Kenya, the Musingis have raised thousands of dollars for water distribution and well-drilling as well as an orphanage.
Musingi said they raised about $6,000 from their Oct. 20 presentation.
You bring your friends, get together, and we enjoy life.
But at the same time, this is a fundraising event.” All proceeds from the benefit will go to help provide clean water for Kenyans as well as to support an orphanage through United in the Hope of Africa.
“It’s been like five years (since the start of the Clean Water in Kenya initiative), and we’re still progressively raising money and stuff like that,” Myka said.
Through slides, pictures and other visual aids, the family brings attention to the water situation in Kenya, along with the daily struggles of life for the region’s residents.
The Musingi children learned these lessons firsthand.
Lugging that around was a big struggle, and I don’t think we realized that a lot of times people were not drinking water to the same standard we were.” The trip inspired the children to get more involved with their father’s passion.

Independent testing found dangerous levels of lead in homes and schools, caused by chemicals in the water supply that corroded the pipes.
"So I started building high capacity lead filters just as a charitable effort.
"After Flint hit the news people started taking a closer look at their water and found that lead is a widespread problem in the US," he says.
Replacing pipes can cost millions of dollars which many cities can’t afford.
Mr Roy assesses the type and level of contamination by analysing publicly available data.
Filters cost around $225 (£172), and replacement cartridges, which are needed every six months, cost $65.
Mr Roy has a PhD in chemistry from the University of Maine, and started his first business, a consulting company, while he was still studying.
They’re led by people who study entrepreneurs and that’s a very different thing."
"In the core part of the business you need to be working with people who actually know what they’re talking about."
"I definitely think this will be an eight figure business in five years," says Mr Roy.

It’s likely both numbers could be higher because they don’t reflect other suspected but unconfirmed cases in remote areas.
Although government officials say they’ve distributed water purification tablets and bottled water throughout the island, by late October there were still places where residents said the help hadn’t arrived.
Two weeks after the hurricane, Gambo Rodriguez’s stepfather started vomiting and came down with a fever.
But a week after he was released from the hospital, Cosme de Jesus was bathing and helping his wife wash clothes on the side of the road.
The situation was slightly better in San Juan, where government figures showed 91 percent of customers had service, but on other parts of the island the percentage was as low as 62.
“All of them, because they don’t have water,” Diaz responded.
But even those with running water are struggling to boil it, Chaves Arana said.
There’s also no definitive testing for leptospirosis available in Puerto Rico; in order to confirm cases, samples have to be sent to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention laboratory in Atlanta.
Most patients don’t develop the more serious symptoms associated with the disease, Deseda said, but because leptospirosis can cause kidney or liver failure in some people, public health officials are advising doctors to immediately treat any suspected cases.
They were hoping to work with the CDC to confirm suspected cases in the future, but hadn’t yet been able to do so.

The village is reported be one of the oldest settlements and has a population of over four hundred inhabitants.
Speaking to this reporter at the weekend, the Alkalo (village head), Bokarr Leigh, explained that his community has been suffering for the lack of access to clean drinking water for some years now.
He said people suffer a lot, especially the women who would travel about five km in search of water in the nearby villages.
He lamented that without clean water it would be difficult for one to purify himself or even to perform ablution to pray.
Mr Leigh also explained that sometimes women have to scramble for water, adding that they would wake up very early in the morning to search for clean water in a nearby village.
He also cited among other hosts of concerns, the lack of horticultural garden in his village, saying that the community is seriously in need as this year’s rainy season was very poor.
He also appealed to the Ministry of Agriculture through their agricultural projects such as GCAV and FASDEP to come to their aid in assisting them with horticultural garden as the community, especially the women are ready and commitment to embark on horticultural activities.
For her part, Penda Jawo, who spoke on behalf of the women expressed grave concern about the difficulties especially, what the women are facing in search of access to clean drinking water.
She said this is a major concern to them and called on the Government, philanthropists and well wishers to come to their assistance and help them with a borehole and garden for the women.
In a related development, the officials of Penny Appeal visited the said village to see for themselves so after the visit they promised to come up with solutions as the community is urgently in need of help.

Two powerful industries, plastic and iron, are locked in a lobbying war over the estimated $300 billion that local governments will spend on water and sewer pipes over the next decade.
And though Congress banned lead water pipes three decades ago, more than 10 million older ones remain, ready to leach lead and other contaminants into drinking water from something as simple as a change in water source.
The American Chemistry Council, a deep-pocketed trade association that lobbies for the plastics industry, has backed bills in at least five states — Michigan, Ohio, South Carolina, Indiana and Arkansas — that would require local governments to open up bids for municipal water projects to all suitable materials, including plastic.
The group operates under the auspices of the American Legislative Exchange Council, a wider effort funded by petrochemicals billionaires Charles G. and David H. Koch that has drawn scrutiny for helping corporations and local politicians write legislation behind closed doors.
At a July convention in Denver that brought together about three dozen local legislators, Bruce Hollands, executive director of the plastic pipe industry group Uni-Bell PVC Pipe Association, discussed what had gone wrong in Flint, and explained what needed to be done to open up local bidding for plastic water pipes.
Plastics are an obvious replacement for the country’s aging pipes.
Lightweight, easy to install, corrosion-free and up to 50 percent cheaper than iron, plastic pipes have already taken the place of copper as the preferred material for service lines that connect homes to municipal mains, as well as water pipes inside the home.
Scientists are just starting to understand the effect of plastic on the quality and safety of drinking water, including what sort of chemicals can leach into the water from the pipes themselves, or from surrounding groundwater contamination.
It’s a more proven material,” said Patrick Hogan, president of the Ductile Iron Pipe Research Association, the industry’s main lobby group.
Yet it has never received regulatory authority from the federal government.

Nearly two months after the Category 4 Hurricane Maria barrelled into Puerto Rico, 60 percent of Puerto Ricans still don’t have power.
A lack of cell phone service plagues one in 10 and around 15 percent of gas stations are still closed.
Excess standing water, lack of access to clean drinking water, and piles of debris are breeding grounds for waterborne and mosquito-borne diseases.
Knowlton, who studied health effects in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy in New York, listed off all the potential public health concerns aside from those illnesses: carbon monoxide poisoning from using generators improperly, spoiled food, unusable medicine, medical devices that don’t work without power, skin infections, and, in the long term, respiratory issues resulting from mold.
“You would do it, I would do it, anyone would do it,” said Knowlton.
BuzzFeed first reported that over 900 bodies were cremated on the island since Sept. 20 when the storm hit, but none were attributed to the hurricane, which has raised questions about the legitimacy of how those deaths were counted.
A photograph of doctors performing surgery by flashlight was noted in The Atlantic.
Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren along with 11 others wrote a letter to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention requesting information on the spread of water and vector-borne diseases in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands during the recovery from Hurricanes Irma and Maria.
The U.S. Virgin Islands has also seen at least one case of leptospirosis and a case of Zika.
A Senate hearing on the recovery efforts in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands is scheduled for Tuesday morning.

Some remote Australian communities have access to drinking water for only nine hours a day for part of the year, but these households can still use up to ten times the average of urban households.
Many communities in the Torres Strait Islands have their mains water supply limited to nine hours a day during the week, and 16 hours a day at weekends, during the six-month dry season from May to October.
Some remote Aboriginal communities in mainland Australia have similar restrictions.
The challenge, therefore, is finding ways to manage this unsustainable water use, apart from physically turning off the water.
The data revealed an average daily use of 900 litres per person, rising to more than 4,000L per person per day in some cases.
We then broke down household water use into categories such as showering and outdoor, and discussed water use habits with each participating household.
We found five key drivers for this high outdoor water use (aside from leaks): dust control (and flea control) from non-surfaced roads and yards cooling down (watering the house roof and bare earth or concrete driveways to create an evaporative effect) washing down boats and fishing or hunting equipment physical amenity (gardening or greening) social amenity (having a continuous source of tap water was an important resource during social gatherings, including sorry camps, tombstone openings, cultural events and extended family gatherings).
Reducing drivers of high water use In urban areas, outdoor household water use is often described as “discretionary”.
Our team, together with the participants and local service providers, trialled a water efficiency pilot program.
This involved both residents and local councils learning about the importance of conserving water and offering suggestions on ways to do this.

People drinking tap water across the Miami area this week may notice the smell and taste of chlorine as Miami-Dade launches the annual cleaning of its underground pipes.
The “cleansing” began Monday and runs through Nov. 19.
Like most water systems across the country, Miami-Dade regularly uses chlorine to disinfect the drinking water it sends to roughly 2.3 million people each day.
She said the chlorine test spreads as the treated water moves farther out into county pipes.
“It depends on how far you are from the plant,” she said.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says the shift from chloramine to base chlorine is common, and allows water systems to clean out a “scum” layer that can form in pipes that makes “killing germs more difficult.” Erik Olson, director of health programs at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said the shift to regular chlorine is a fairly common tactic in water systems across the country and should not raise concerns.
As a result, water systems typically make a brief shift to base chlorine and then flush out the system, often using fire hydrants.
“The bottom line is it’s not a problem, as long as it’s short-term,” he said.
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