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You bet we care

There are thousands of men and women in Manitoba who work with water. Their jobs vary from the emergency crews that can be found fixing a broken water main on a cold winter night, to a technician testing drinking water to be sure it’s safe for human consumption, to a researcher taking mud samples from the bottom of Lake Winnipeg.

The Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) is Canada's largest union, and represents public employees, including a wide variety of water workers throughout the country. The president of CUPE Manitoba speaks of his members with conviction, “Water workers are as essential to society as the most skilled surgeon, you bet we care about water”. These views are reinforced by the incoming president of the Manitoba Water and Wastewater Association, “Many of us work side-by-side with CUPE members in a strong professional atmosphere that has contributed to big gains in innovation and adaptation.”

Water workers come in all sizes, genders and age groups. Some are self-employed, some work for small service companies like plumbers. Most work for large corporations and government organizations. Some work in computer rooms while others patrol irrigation canals or operate hydro electricity plants. The range of jobs they do is as wide as Manitoba itself.

Winnipeg’s water workers

They are an invisible army of men and women who go to work each day at the plants, offices and mobile sites that comprise Winnipeg’s 2,400 kilometres of water mains (a distance equivalent to that between Winnipeg and Montreal). They ensure that about 21,150 fire hydrants are in good working order and they maintain a total of 3,391 kilometres of sewer systems (equivalent to the distance between Winnipeg and Moncton, NB).

A big concern with municipal water workers is leaks. Not all leaks from broken pipes well up to the surface. The water from such leaks often finds its way into storm or sanitary sewer lines and escapes from the system without ever being detected. At one time unaccounted for water amounted to almost one-quarter of the entire water processed annually. But Winnipeg’s water workers have figured out a way to find many of those leaks; they call it ‘listening to hydrants’. By using sound detection equipment and other electronic techniques, and their own knowledge and experience, these workers have identified over 1,000 such leaks since 1999. This saved the City lots of money and reduced demands on the environment.

Covering the waterfront

There are many non-government organizations (NGO’s) in Manitoba and Canada that are concerned with water. Their interests range from water supply, water treatment, water quality, water distribution, water research, and water conservation. Winnipeg Water Watch is one such group. This coalition of community groups and individuals has developed a set of principles pertaining to water. They include:

• water is a public trust. All Canadians have the right to be involved in major decisions affecting water in Canada.
• an adequate supply of clean water for people’s daily living needs is a basic human right.
• it is wrong – environmentally, economically and morally – to engage in the large-scale trade of water. Water should not be regarded as a commodity for exchange in the international marketplace.

Water is the lifeblood of the environment as well as being essential for human survival. Each generation must ensure that the abundance and quality of water is not diminished as a result of its activities. Greater efforts must be made to restore the health of aquatic ecosystems that have already been degraded as well as to protect others from harm.