First of all, it's difficult to get a boil water advisory moving in a community. After that, the challenges are technical and financial. There are also supply chain issues, delivery issues, issues with the elderly and having to meet the special needs of special needs children. There is so much in the emergency plan that needs to get activated all at once when in fact there's a boil water advisory taking place. Not only that, but then there are the technical issues of bringing engineers in and bringing in testing. We don't have our testing base here in the city of London.
If we go back to when the pandemic was happening, we were under a boil water advisory, and we were constantly trying to test our water during this emergency—not only an emergency for us but throughout all of Canada and the world—but that service delivery isn't there. The boil water advisory doesn't come off all at once following the testing. On some days, the water tests “good”, and then, shortly down the road, it falls back down again. Just delivering filters to the water treatment plant when you're at 110% to 115% overworked in that.... I can advise the committee that the one micron filter that is needed to do the final filtration within the system only lasted two days, and that's at $400 a filter, so the cost alone is exponentially escalated, trying to get the system back online.
It's not just a matter of having a test. It's all of these progressive things that you need to go through in order to try to bring the system back online and ensure that there is quality there for a period of time. It's also about addressing the immediate needs of the community and of the households, and the liability of what you're doing falls back on chief and council in terms of activating and ensuring that the technical work is being done properly so that we don't harm our community members.