The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
Jonathon Naylor Editor Flin Flon City Council is working to devise a better system of notifying residents when their water will be temporarily shut off. Council has traditionally advertised water shutoffs on CFAR and through an information hotline, but that approach is proving inadequate. 'There's no question we have to do a better job so we're going to be looking at how to do that better job,' Mayor George Fontaine said at last week's council meeting. See 'Resid...' pg. 11 Continued from pg.1 His statement came after local resident Kathryn Church said she unexpectedly lost her water for nine hours on Saturday, Nov. 17. Church phoned the city hotline, which told her the Lakeview area would be without water, but since she is not originally from Flin Flon she did not know which streets that encompassed. As for CFAR, she said not everyone is tuning in. 'I'm just wondering if there's a way we can notify everybody in a better way than CFAR because when I'm at work all day, I don't have access to CFAR,' Church told council. 'So I had no idea that my water was going to be shut off for nine hours on a Saturday.' Church suggested lengthy shutoffs be advertised in The Reminder, but in this case the city did not have enough time to do that. Municipal Administrator Mark Kolt said the city would immediately begin posting shutoffs on its website. He said there are other methods that could be examined, including following the lead of some other communities by sending out emergency e-mails to individual residents. 'Ten years ago that might not have been feasible, but now even people over 50...most of them will have some sort of e-mail contact,' Kolt said. 'Again that will only work if you're checking your e-mail regularly.' A complicating factor, Kolt said, is the fact that some shutoffs relate to work done outside of the city's control, such as that at the new water treatment plant. Coun. Bill Hanson said he believed the nine-hour shutoff was only supposed to last four hours but 'something blew apart' after the relevant maintenance work began. 'Our infrastructure is aging,' said Coun. Hanson, chair of the city's Engineering Services Committee. If Church unexpectedly losing her water wasn't enough, she said when she called the city's emergency number for clarification she was 'spoken to very rudely.' Mayor Fontaine was not happy to hear that, saying she deserved to be treated with politeness.
