1:57 p.m. update: If people were drinking the water before the notice came out and they feel sick they should immediately go and see a physician, according to Jessy Bhatti, Specialist Environmental Health Officer with Interior Health.
When it comes to people using water softeners, they should follow “manufacturer’s instructions regarding use, disinfection and any other directions from the manufacturer.”
Original story: People should expect the 108 Mile water boil notice to be in effect for at least a week, according to Peter Hughes, Manager of Environmental Services with the Cariboo Regional District (CRD).
“At one sample location, we had one Total Coliforms reported as one E.Coli the other one was fire total and four E.Coli. These are pretty low concentrations. I’m not trying to make this sound not, it’s a serious situation but the concentrations are small, we took five samples from the system that day from various locations and two came back with positive results, the other three were clean.”
They’ve shocked the reservoir by putting chlorine in and that should now work its way through the system and deal with that, says Hughes.
“Typically we have to have three clean samples in a row based on three different days before they’ll allow us to lift the boil water notice we’re sampling today, we’re sampling tomorrow and we’ll be sampling again on Monday. So I would suspect we wouldn’t have results until probably Wednesday of next week for that last sample,” says Hughes.
The cause is part of the ongoing investigation, according to Hughes.
“We’re trying to figure out what happened here.”