FORT FRANCES — The Town of Fort Frances is gearing up for significant work on the water tower in order to keep it tip-top shape, providing pressure and reserves for the system for decades to come.
The discussion of the water tower and the work it requires was one of the key parts of Monday night’s Special Meeting of Council regarding the 2025 budget.
While councillors and town administration discussed myriad items within the proposed capital budget for 2025, staff felt that the issue of the water tower was deserving its own item, as the project is large in scope and cost, coming in at an estimated $4,033,800.
According to a report prepared for council by Town of Fort Frances operations and facilities manager Travis Rob, the water tower last saw major work done in 2008 when the exterior of the tower was re-coated.
Following that work, the town has used a remote-operated vehicle (ROV) every five years to survey the interior water tank to monitor its condition. According to Rob, there have been issues the town has been keeping an eye on for some years now, and the time has come to address them.
“In 2017, the condition rating of the interior was ‘good to excellent,’ the exterior was ‘fair condition’ with a recommended re-coat in 5 - 7 years,” Rob wrote in his report to council.
“The report noted substantial deficiencies in the fall arrest and high angle rescue systems within the tower along with structural and finish repairs to be completed or watched with an estimated repair cost at $910,000 to $940,000 USD.
"At this time, there was already substantial fading and chalking of the exterior finish on the tower. In 2022, another ROV inspection was completed and noted not only the fall arrest and high-angle rescue work to be done, but further substantial deterioration of the exterior coating. “
Following that 2022 inspection, Rob noted the condition of the tank interior was downgraded to “fair to poor,” and the exterior coating was deemed “poor.”
The report also noted that the cost of doing the work at that time was estimated to be $2.75 million to $3.25 million, and it would take one to three years to complete.
Rob shared that further delays to the project would increase the cost of the overall project by $400,000 per year, roughly 10 percent per year if the project were delayed one to two years, or 15 to 20 percent per year if the project was delayed beyond two years, though he also noted it would be difficult to determine the true cost as the deterioration of the tower would increase at an “exponential” rate.
“Longer delay in work is difficult to determine as deterioration happens on an exponential curve and with out additional ROV inspections, where we are on the curve is hard to predict,” Rob wrote.
“Due to this, a 15-20 percent per year increase is likely an underestimation.”
At Monday night’s meeting, Rob reiterated the project would be costly and time-consuming, but that the work would likely ensure the tower was good to go for the next few decades without a need for further significant financial investment.
“There’s really a lot of components to this,” Rob explained.
"As I had said, you know, this isn’t a ‘once every five year’ sort of project. This is a ‘once every 35 year’ project. The tower was originally constructed in 1984 so the next time, you know, we’re going to be looking 25-30 years down the line at another re-coat, like we did in 2009 and then, you know, another period after that, before we get back to another situation like we’re in right now, where we have to bring it back to bare metal and do a complete recode.
"To do this work, it requires erection of scaffolding up to and around the entire tank hoarding so that obviously the sandblasting powder doesn’t go everywhere. It’s quite an intensive project.”
In a round of questioning that followed Rob’s report to council, coun. John McTaggart brought up the timeline, noting that even though Rob said the project would keep the tower in good condition for roughly three decades, it was less than two decades since work was last done on the tower, which the operations and facilities manager acknowledged.
McTaggart followed up by asking if the three major components of the project – the interior tank, the exterior re-coat, and the fall arrest systems – could be separated out and dealt with over a period of two years in order to offset the financial strain on the town.
Rob explained that though they are separate components, most of the work will require significant scaffolding to be erected, and it would be more cost-effective to have to only erect scaffolding once.
“It’s about a month’s worth of work,” Rob said.
“It’s about a million dollars to do that. In order to do the interior tank re-coat, they have to do scaffolding inside the tank, much the same. And in order to get access for that scaffolding, they need the scaffolding on the outside.
"So those two projects may seem like they could happen independently of each other, but really in terms of cost-effectiveness, it is more cost-effective to do it as one project than separately.”
Picking up on one of Rob’s possible scenarios presented to council, specifically the possibility of decommissioning the tower, coun. Steve Maki asked what its ramifications would be, though he made sure to stress he was not advocating for actually decommissioning the tower.
Rob noted that as the tower is responsible for pressurizing a large portion of the town’s water supply, as well as adding some chlorination to keep levels at necessary levels into the west end of town, removing the tower would require significant investment into additional pressure pumps and an additional chlorination system.
Additionally, it would significantly impact the town’s overall water supply, with Rob noting the tower holds roughly one million gallons of water, which wouldn’t last long in an emergency.
“In the event that there is an emergency condition, whether that be us, if your water main break major structural fire, we can burn through a million gallons in the Water Tower in an awful hurry.
"If we take our overall system capacity and cut that in half, that time goes down substantially in the event of some sort of emergency, like a rail spill, where we can’t draw our source water out of the river, we have about a day and a half worth of water between the plant and the tower that we can run without actually treating any new water again, if we, if we take and decommission the tower, that time gets cut dramatically. So there are lots of little issues with decommissioning the tower.”
Fort Frances mayor Andrew Hallikas weighed in on the discussion by acknowledging the importance of the tower to the town’s water supply and asked Rob what it might look like as the work is being done, as the tower would likely have to be emptied for a significant period of time.
Rob explained that the water tower would mostly remain operable, but when the time comes to do the interior of the water tank, the town would likely implement restrictions on non-essential water usage as it did during the work done in 2008. Other plans would have to be put in place for emergency and fire response during that time.
Some councillors raised the question of spreading the work out over multiple budget cycles to lessen the impact or potentially taking on a loan of $4 million to allow the town to pay the costs over two years.
Rob reiterated the increasing costs of putting the work off for too much longer, and town treasurer Dawn Galusha cautioned that taking a loan of that size would likely incur more cost in the long run due to higher interest rates than what the town sees on its reserve funds.
Discussion eventually boiled down to council agreeing the work should be done in one go, but differing on whether to do it in 2025 or push the work one year to 2026, with councillors eventually agreeing to go ahead with the project in the 2025 budget, with work estimated to be done in six months, beginning in spring 2025 and “going to completion next fall,” said Rob.
Fort Frances Times / Local Journalism Initiative
