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Education/training

Centre teams up with nine Ontario colleges

Walkerton Clean Water Centre

The men and women in charge of our drinking water will soon start to retire in significant numbers, and will need to be replaced.

DAVID CHILTON

[ 2007-10-21 ]

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Those replacing them will require training. That's where the Walkerton Clean Water Centre comes in. Established in 2004, two years after the O'Connor Report on the Walkerton disaster -- seven died and 2,300 became ill in 2000 after drinking or using town water contaminated with E. coli bacteria -- the centre has teamed up with nine colleges in the province to ensure Ontario gets clean water.

TRAINING

Specifically, the centre's mandate is to deliver drinking water education and training for owners, operators and the operation authorities of drinking water systems. The centre is also charged with providing support to those same individuals and groups with a focus on small, remote and older systems, to demonstrate leading-edge drinking water treatment technology and to advise the Ministry of the Environment on research and development.

Saad Jasim, the centre's CEO, says it has more than 20 courses available to water systems operators and authorities and is moving towards putting more of them online. The Operation of Small Drinking Water Systems course, now delivered by correspondence, is moving online and so is the Preventing Water-borne Illnesses course.

The bulk of the centre's instruction is still delivered on-site, however. Jasim, a chemical engineer with a doctorate from the University of Wales in the U.K., says courses are offered at various locations throughout the province, which helps operators get the training they need. Among the courses is the 14-hour Chlorination and Disinfection, the seven-hour Filtration, and Groundwater, Wells and Well Pumps, which takes 11 hours.

At the university level, the centre has teamed up with the University of Western Ontario in London to offer a course on drinking water quality.

The centre's college connection is the Entry Level Drinking Water Operator (ELDWO) course. It started this year and is taught as part of the nine colleges' various environmental programs. In the GTA, Seneca, Centennial, Durham and Sheridan have all signed up, as have other schools such as Mohawk in Hamilton and Sir Sandford Fleming in Lindsay.

"This (the college instruction) will help to have more people available to the industry," Jasim says, alluding to the wave of retirement expected over the next few years.

Steve Thompson, program co-ordinator of the Environmental Technology program at Fleming, says the ELDWO course is taught over the two years his students spend at the college.

Thompson says the course content looks at the best way to treat all contaminants, such as bacteria, viruses and fertilizer runoff. (It was farm runoff that caused the deaths and illnesses in Walkerton in 2000.)

QUALIFICATIONS

Passing the ELDWO course doesn't mean that Thompson's 92 students will automatically head for a career in drinking water systems, but it will provide them with the right qualification should they wish to do so.

The ELDWO course came about as a result of the O'Connor Report into the Walkerton disaster. The Ministry of the Environment decided that water systems operators needed a further level of instruction before they could go into supply and treatment plants. As Thompson says, "(Training) has become extremely rigid compared to a number of years ago."