The County of Grande Prairie has issued an update regarding the ongoing valve replacement project in Hythe.
The project was originally scheduled to be completed by mid-October, but officials cite “access issues” as the reason for the delay, which is now slated for some time in mid-December.
County of GP Director of Municipal Utilities Dalen Peterson explains excavation delays due to underground utilities and unmapped waterlines have impacted his department’s ability to perform the necessary repairs. He says this is largely due to the county’s absorption of the Village of Hythe, transitioning the municipality into a hamlet in 2021.
“There’s a lot of shallow underground utilities that have been installed overtop of them,” he says. “It’s an older system that I’m pretty sure Hythe had taken over at some point and now with us taking over Hythe there’s a lack of records so some of the assumptions of where the waterlines are aren’t actually, in reality, what’s underground.”
The county maintains that during the rotating outages, water will continue to be shut off from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. daily unless otherwise indicated; however, only properties connected to the Hythe Waterworks system will be affected.
To combat the impact on residents, a temporary water system is in place; however, low water pressure may be experienced by anyone on the system during outages.
All residents outside the outage area are still asked to reduce their water usage until after 5:00 p.m. on days when outages are scheduled.
