With the Okanagan drought level at a three as of June 21, the City of Penticton is cutting back its watering practices and asking residents to do the same.
According to Todd Whyte, the parks supervisor for the city, Penticton has already cut back its water usage by about 30 per cent due to the area’s dry conditions. In a release issued on June 27, the city is requesting all domestic and agriculture users to follow suit and voluntarily reduce water consumption by 15 per cent.
“Two simple ways to achieve the 15 per cent water reduction goal is to reduce the total time your automatic irrigation system is watering by 15 per cent or to remove one day of watering from a 14-day cycle and leave all other settings as is,” states the release.
READ MORE: Okanagan moved to level two drought as precaution
Whyte explained that the city utilizes four different types of water irrigation, one from the “Penticton irrigation district off of the Penticton Creek” that services Poplar Grove, and three other sources “for irrigating parks.”
“One is treated affluent, which comes from the wastewater treatment plant. And quite a large area of the city is irrigated with those waters. This includes King’s Park, the landscape around the SOEC, the baseball field behind the convention centre, all of the Penticton Golf Course, Skaha Park and some school areas,” said Whyte. “So a lot of the water we use in our parks is treated wastewater. And when we do that, it adds another filtration of that wastewater before it enters the water cycle again. And there’s a certain threshold of how much of that water we can put into the creek, and if we put too much we have to do a major investment to doing a deep water outfall into Skaha Lake, which would be an enormous project.”
The city parks employees also use raw lake water from Okanagan Lake to water certain parks such as Okanagan Lake Park, Marina Way Park and Rotary Park. Whyte said the rest of the city’s parks are watered with potable water, but the majority of land and plants that are being tended to are getting treated affluent or raw lake water.
“Even all of the hanging flower baskets on Penticton’s 100, 200 and 300 block are watered with raw lake water. And we do daily monitoring on them, normally they’d be watered twice a day so super short cycles,” said Whyte.
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He said that approximately 80 per cent of the city’s irrigation systems are centrally controlled, and the rest must be physically changed by hand if adjustments are required.
During times of drought, the city prioritizes which parks areas need to have the watering practices upheld and which can be left.
Whyte said “sports field are something that have a high level of maintenance” and they try to keep them to a solid standard due to the users.
“We also designate our parks A, B and C - so A standard parks are going to be waterfront ones that people use quite regularly and are the ones we use conservation efforts on already, but we’ve dialed back our watering practices even more anyway.”
Whyte said residents will see a “browning out” of some of the city’s parkland as a result of the water restrictions its voluntarily placed into effect.
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